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2004-03-19

Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando's "Pessoas" Suspended in Ironic Multiplicity: Fernando's "Pessoas" Suspended in

Kierkegaardian Irony Kierkegaardian Irony

Michelle Pulsipher Hale Brigham Young University - Provo

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IRONIC MULTIPLICITY: FERNANDO’S “PESSOAS” SUSPENDED IN

KIERKEGAARDIAN IRONY

by

Michelle Pulsipher Hale

A thesis submitted to the faculty of

Brigham Young University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Comparative Literature

Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature

Brigham Young University

April 2004

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE COMMITTEE APPROVAL

of a thesis submitted by

Michelle Pulsipher Hale

This thesis has been read by each member of the following graduate committee and by majority vote has been found to be satisfactory. _____________________________ ____________________________________ Date Steven P. Sondrup, Chair _____________________________ ____________________________________ Date Stanley V. Benfell _____________________________ ____________________________________ Date Christopher C. Lund

ii

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

As chair of the candidate’s committee, I have read the dissertation of Michelle Pulsipher Hale in its final form and have found that (1) its format, citations, and bibliographic style are consistent and acceptable and fulfill university and department style requirements; (2) its illustrative materials including figures, tables, and charts are in place; and (3) the final manuscript is satisfactory to the graduate committee and is ready for submission to the university library. _______________________ __________________________________________ Date Steven P. Sondrup Chair, Graduate Committee Accepted for the Department __________________________________________ V. Stanley Benfell Department Chair Accepted for the College __________________________________________ Van C. Gessel Dean, College of Humanties

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ABSTRACT

IRONIC MULTIPLICITY: FERNANDO’S “PESSOAS” SUSPENDED IN

KIERKEGAARDIAN IRONY

Michelle Pulsipher Hale

Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature

Master of Comparative Literature

This thesis applies Søren Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony as outlined in his

master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony, to the literary works of Fernando Pessoa. Recently

Kierkegaardian scholarship has opened possibilities for non-traditional interpretation of

Kierkegaard’s dissertation and pseudonymous “aesthetic” texts by reading them in the

ironic tone in which they were written. This paper offers a similar re-reading of the

poetic and prose works Pessoa attributes to his heteronyms.

Kierkegaard’s presentation of Socrates as irony serves as a model for how Pessoa

sustains the heteronymic project by balancing the use of rhetorical irony within the works

of the heteronyms with simultaneous use of “Socratic” irony relating to both the

heteronyms and their literary contributions. Pessoa “controls” irony by bringing his

heteronyms into his historical reality whereby he posits subjectivities for them. The

necessary element of eros as it is identified with Socrates and thereby with irony is

iv

defined negatively as the desire for that which one is lacking and is sustained by the

distance inherent in desire. Irony-eros as desire is present in the works of each of

Pessoa’s poetic heteronyms, gains for them corporeality, and characterizes the

relationship the reader has with those works. Pessoa, like Socrates, is unable to extend

controlled irony to his personal life and remains in the negativity of desire.

Bernardo Soares and O Livro do Desassossego challenge traditional notions of

reality since Soares feels with equal intensity the reality of his actuality and that of his

imagination. Kierkegaard holds that the imagination provides the thinker with various

possibilities or ideals. The thinker must then actualize the ideal. Kierkegaard’s

pseudonyms offer possible life-views as do Pessoa’s heteronyms. The distance of irony

is essential, for in reflecting on the life-views, the reader must not be able to see the

author in that reflection. Unlike Kierkegaard, Pessoa successfully distanced himself from

his heteronyms by multiplying and deferring his identity. Adept in Socratic midwifery

Pessoa establishes the subjectivity of other “Pessoas” through whom he offers his readers

possibilities. Pessoa’s ironic existence proves the self is indefinable and unassimilable to

any System.

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express my appreciation to the members of my thesis committee for their

patience in working with someone who was over 2,000 miles away. I am especially

grateful to Kit Lund for his invaluable help with many English translations of Pessoa’s

writings. Special thanks go to Cristy Meiners for her help in providing the committee

members with my drafts, and to Carolyn Hone and Jenny Webb for taking care of the

administrative necessities I was unable to see to myself. My gratitude extends most

certainly to my husband Steve, who has gone to great lengths (and great distances) to

encourage my academic pursuits, and to my son Ian, who has been with me since the

earliest beginnings of this project.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction......................................................................................................................... 3

Chapter One: Interacting Irony: The Poetic Heteronyms ................................................ 25

“Controlled Irony” ........................................................................................................ 25 The Poetic Community ................................................................................................. 30

Fernando Pessoa “ortónimo” .................................................................................. 30 Alberto Caeiro .......................................................................................................... 40 Ricardo Reis.............................................................................................................. 44 Álvaro de Campos..................................................................................................... 55

Chapter Two: Eros: The Embodiment of Irony............................................................... 63 Chapter Three: Imagined Reality and the Irony of Bernardo Soares’s Livro do Dessassosego...................................................................................................... 89

Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa ......................................................................... 90 Kierkegaard and Imagination........................................................................................ 99 Soares and Imagination............................................................................................... 103 Soares and Irony ......................................................................................................... 106

Chapter Four: Multiple Redefinings .............................................................................. 115

“Multiple Redefinition of Terms”............................................................................... 115 Role of the Reader ...................................................................................................... 121 Multiple Redefinition of Self ...................................................................................... 125

Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 145

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How many masks wear we, and undermasks,

Upon our countenance of soul, and when

If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,

Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?

The true mask feels no inside to the mask

But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.

Whatever consciousness begins the task

The task’s accepted use to sleepness ties.

Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,

Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,

Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces

And get a whole world on their forgot causing;

And, when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking,

Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

Fernando Pessoa

1

2

Introduction

In 1846 as an appendix to his last pseudonymous work, Søren Kierkegaard wrote

to his readership:

My pseudonymity or polyonymity has not had an accidental basis in my

person […] but an essential basis in the production itself, which, for the

sake of the lines and of the psychologically varied difference of the

individualities, poetically required an indiscriminateness with regard to

good and evil, brokenheartedness and gaiety, despair and overconfidence,

suffering and elation, etc., which is ideally limited only by psychological

consistency, which no factually actual person dares allow himself or can

want to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality. (Concluding

Unscientific Postscript [625])

The poetic “indiscriminateness” to which Kierkegaard refers is realized through his use

of irony. Only a generation later, Fernando Pessoa, with the same “indiscriminateness,”

would sustain a similarly “polyonymous” project. Although in his pseudonymous texts

Kierkegaard explores possibilities that are outside the limitations of his “psychological

consistency,” Pessoa and his heteronyms, stretching the “moral limitations of actuality,”

challenge the very notion of a consistent psychology. Kierkegaardian irony, as outlined

and exemplified in The Concept of Irony and the pseudonymous texts, suspends Pessoa’s

project in a revealing light that offers possible interpretations for the purpose of the

heteronyms and possible explanations of readership reactions. Interestingly

Kierkegaard’s works were not translated into English from the German translations until

the late 1930s, after Pessoa’s death.

3

In the days and what became years following 30 November 1935 and the

premature death of a forty-seven year-old Fernando Antônio Nogueira Pessoa, João

Gaspar Simões and Luís de Montalvor set about fulfilling their task of preparing Pessoa’s

unedited works for publication. It was 1942 before the first volume of Pessoa’s Obras

Completas was finally put into print (Simões, “Sobre as ‘Obras,” 115). Although the

painstaking process took his colleagues and friends nearly seven years to complete, as if

driven by a sense of urgency and a sudden awareness of his own invaluable contribution

to Portuguese and world literature, Pessoa had spent the last five years of his life

preparing his papers himself (Simões, Preface, 12). Pessoa’s now famous trunk was the

repository for his thoughts—a documentary of a life lived unlike any other. Scraps of

paper with scribbled lines, fragments of poetry and prose attributed to well over forty

different names, and an imaginary world presented with such conviction as to cause one

to doubt one’s own reality—these were the contents of Pessoa’s treasure chest and the

valuable clues to a remarkable existence lived in virtual solitude.

Since his death and the subsequent initial publication of his complete works, the

world slowly is awakening to the genius of Fernando Pessoa. Colleagues such as Simões,

Montalvor, José Régio, and others who worked with Pessoa, together with Portuguese

scholars Jorge de Sena, Jacinto do Prado Coelho, and Maria Aliete de Galhoz, to name

only a few, launched a series of publications including original compositions, personal

correspondence, biographies, and critical analyses that have proved foundational to

Pessoa scholarship. As more fragments from the trunk have been recovered and more

correspondence has come forth, a parallel increase in scholarly attention has been

unavoidable. Translations of selections of Pessoa’s poetry and prose have surfaced in

4

multiple languages, the foremost of English translators being Richard Zenith. Recently,

Pessoa has captured the interest of American literary critics such as Harold Bloom, and

Pessoa’s works have been included in studies of trans-Atlantic poets. As late as 1998,

Darlene J. Sadlier published An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa for English-reading

audiences. Still more fragments surface, and much of Pessoa’s Portuguese remains

untranslated, already adding to the volumes, written and unwritten, of commentary,

analysis, criticism, and praise. This paper is only one more.

The critical literary and philosophical trends of the latter half of the twentieth

century also gave rise to a significant turning point in the history of Kierkegaardian

scholarship. Studies by scholars such as Sylvianie Agacinski upset traditional scholarly

approaches to the Danish philosopher’s ironic “aesthetic” works in particular, opening

Kierkegaard’s life and writings to new and different possibilities. Later readings have

engendered re-readings, which in turn have sparked considerable and innovative

discourse about Kierkegaard’s ironic style and indirect communications. Agacinski, John

Vignaux Smyth, Roger Poole, and Mark C. Taylor are only a few who have argued

specifically that Kierkegaard’s dissertation The Concept of Irony is best understood when

read in the tone and spirit of how it was written, meaning ironically. The results of such

ironic re-readings have cast Kierkegaard in a postmodern light revealing within his works

forerunning threads of Derridian, Adornian, Lacanian, and Kristeavian thought, among

others. What this means for the concept of irony is that it maintains open the space

necessary in order for the process of deconstructive and infinite deferral to take place,

because irony, desire, eros is inherently never resolved and cannot be assimilated within

not just the Hegelian system, but any system that presupposes to circumscribe all aspects

5

of human experience. What such a conception of irony means for a reader of Fernando

Pessoa is precisely the question to which this essay responds.

Relatively new to even the late re-readers of Kierkegaard, I must recognize a few

scholars to whom I am greatly indebted for their ideas and perspectives. John Vignaux

Smyth’s A Question of Eros presents the erotic aspects of Kierkegaardian irony which,

when extended to Fernando Pessoa have proved fruitful in deciphering certain readership

reactions to and relationships with the texts that make up Pessoa’s oeuvre. Roger Poole’s

Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication was essential in helping to define the role of

irony as presented in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings, to which my analysis is limited,

allowing me to develop the template necessary to see irony at work and play in Fernando

Pessoa. Although I could never aspire to the type of Lego-lingo system Poole ascribes to

Kierkegaard’s use of Hegelian terms, Pessoa himself, in various ways and using various

personalities, sets about to redefine essential terms such as “subjectivity,” “reality,”

“actuality,” and “self” in an attempt to reconcile the finite with the infinite. Mark C.

Taylor’s Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship has similarly provided the possibility

of applying Pessoa’s system of selves to Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the self by

coherently presenting Kierkegaard’s view of selfhood. Other Kierkegaard scholarship

has been instrumental in clarifying complex philosophical and literary content and is

specifically acknowledged within the text of my argument.

In the following pages I offer a re-reading of Fernando Pessoa based on the recent

re-readings of Søren Kierkegaard. Pessoa, I argue, has placed himself in the same

position Kierkegaard reserved for Socrates and for himself, that of the midwife of

6

modernity. The following passage from The Concept of Irony is the crux of

Kierkegaard’s description of Socrates’s negative, ironic subjectivity:

Early Greek culture had outlived itself, a new principle had to

emerge[…]. The new principle must contend; world history needs an

accoucheur [obstetrician]. Socrates fills this place. He himself was not

the one who was to bring the new principle its fullness; in him it was only

κατα κρύφιν [cryptically] present; he was to make its advancement

possible. But this intermediate stage, which is not the new principle and

yet is that (potentia non actu [potentially, not actually]), is precisely irony.

(211)

Although Socrates brought a new principle to classical Hellenism, by Kierkegaard’s own

time the world needed another accoucheur. A master eiron himself, Kierkegaard’s

dissertation and game with Danish Hegelianism ushered in a newer principle and a newer

phase of world history. Fernando Pessoa, born only thirty-three years after the death of

Kierkegaard, and situated in the tiny country Pessoa would later claim is the eye of

Europe,1 has done no less for the progress of history by propelling us beyond modernity.

From Greece to Denmark to Portugal,2 Socratic irony bred subjectivity; Kierkegaard

declared ironic subjectivity an infinite and unassimilable mode of engaging the world;

1 An excerpt from first stanza of Mensagem, the only work Pessoa saw published in a book in his lifetime and for which he won second prize in a competition: “A Europa jaz, posta nos cotovellos: / […] Fita, com olhar sphyngico e fatal, / O Occidente, futuro do passado. / O rosto com que fita é Portugal” (OP [1-44]). [Europe reclines, leaning on her elbows: / (…) She gazes, with a fatal, sphinx-like look, / The West, future of the past. / The face with which she gazes is Portugal.] 2 Pessoa might argue Greece and Portugal are the only two nations with divine destinies: “Só duas nações—a Grécia passada e Portugal futuro—receberam dos deuses a concessão de serem não só elas mas também todas as outras. Chamo a sua atenção para o fato, mais importante que geográfico, de que Lisboa e Atenas estão quase na mesma latitude” (Obras em Prosa 331). [Only two nations—the Greece of times past and the Portugal of tomorrow—have received from the gods the gift of being not only themselves but all the others too. I should like to draw your attention to the fact, which is more that just geographical, that Lisbon and Athens are on almost the same latitude] (Centenary Pessoa 191).

7

Fernando Pessoa so engaged the world and proved himself, the self, unassimilable,

indefinite, and indefinable. Pessoa, like Socrates, is as easy to form a picture of as is the

elf wearing an invisibility cap.3 The process is not complete. There will be more

midwives.

The document in hand is not the first study that juxtaposes the irony-laden works

of the Danish philosopher and his pseudonyms with those of the Portuguese poet and his

heteronyms in an attempt to paint a clearer picture of Pessoa’s person. Ana Hatherly, the

contemporary Portuguese poetess, essayist, and translator, draws a delightful comparison

between Kierkegaard’s-Victor Eremita’s-A’s4 description of “the unhappiest one” and

Pessoa’s poetic description of himself, extracting poems from the unedited corpus

attributed to “ortónimo” and lines from Pessoa’s Primerio Fausto to prove that Portugal’s

Poet deserves privileged occupancy of the “empty tomb of the West.” While Hatherly’s

pen-strokes reveal Pessoa in the portrait of A’s unhappiest man, my own emphasize the

emptiness of Pessoa’s tomb, if the comparison is a true one, and the dissolution of his

portrait in the same moment the group of Συµπαρανεκρωµενοι believes to have finished

it.5 The final page and word of this paper may signify a completion of sorts, but if my

3 In The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard says of Socrates whose person we know only through the writings and perspectives of others, “If we now say that irony constituted the substance of his existence (this is, to be sure, a contradiction, but it is supposed to be that) and if we further postulate that irony is a negative concept, it is easy to see how difficult it becomes to fix the picture of him—indeed, it seems impossible or at least as difficult as to picture a nisse with the cap that makes him invisible” (12). 4 Kiekegaard’s Either/Or is edited by the pseudonymous Victor Eremita who claims to have discovered the papers he has edited and published. Because he is only able to decipher the first name of one of the two authors, Eremita decides to label them respectively authors “A” and “B.” “A” is the author attributed with the document entitled, “The Unhappiest One.” 5 The short piece, “The Unhappiest One,” is an address made at a meeting of a group that calls themselves “Συµπαρανεκρωµενοι” meaning “association of buried lives” or “association of the buried-alive,” and is concerned with finding someone who might fill the tomb whose inscription reads, “The Unhappiest One.” The orator discusses different qualities and attributes that would describe the unhappiest person, and just when he thinks he has drawn an adequate picture of one who might occupy the empty tomb, the “inspired” orator concludes, “Farewell, then, you the unhappiest one! But what am I saying—‘the unhappiest’? I ought to say ‘the happiest,’ for this is indeed precisely a gift of fortune that no one can give himself. See,

8

argument proceeds correctly, just when we seem to have attached even a possible identity

to Fernando Pessoa, he will disappear once more, and we will find ourselves again

standing by the empty grave.

By declaring an elusive Pessoa the empty embodiment of irony, I have had to

render suspect the literal interpretation of any piece of writing, especially among his

prose, attributed to Pessoa or his heteronyms. Whereas I am certainly not the first to

challenge Pessoa and his contradictory assertions, the question of his sincerity has

sparked considerable debate among scholars, many of whom deliberately defend Pessoa’s

right to be believed, viewing any skepticism concerning his assertions as an attack on his

integrity. Let me qualify my statements by assuring the reader that Pessoa’s ability to

convince his readers of the “reality” latent in his heteronyms is a very important part of

my argument. It is the continual evidence of the success of his ironic project.

Acknowledging Pessoa’s use of irony to relate to his heteronymic project and to the

world in general does not preclude the notion that Pessoa was indeed sincere and serious

about all he said and wrote. That a debate even exists indicates the presence of

possibilities worth exploring, and often what is arguably “sincere” also arguably can be

read ironically. Kierkegaardian irony, as I will lay out below, allows for a seriousness

that might serve to reconcile the Pessoan debate. The debate is further complicated, and

the irony enriched, by the fact that most of what we know of Pessoa comes from his own

writings. For the sake of situating my own argument, it might be interesting to hear a few

voices from both sides of the “sincerity” issue.

language breaks down, and the thought is confused, for who indeed is the happiest but the unhappiest and who the unhappiest but the happiest, and what is life but madness, and faith but foolishness, and hope but a staving off of the evil day, and love but vinegar in the wound. He disappeared, and we stand again by the empty grave” (Either/Or 230).

9

In a letter to Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues dated September of 1914 Pessoa

confesses:

O facto é que neste momento atravesso um período de crise na minha vida.

[…] Quero disciplinar a minha vida (e, consequentemente, a minha obra)

como a um estado anárquico, anárquico pelo próprio excesso de “forces

vivas” em acção, conflito, e evolução inerconexa e divergente. Não sei se

estou sendo perfeitamente lúcido. Creio que estou sendo sincero. Tenho

pelo menos aquele amargo de espírito que é trazido pela prática anti-social

da sinceridade. Sim, devo estar a ser sincero. (34)

[The fact is that at this moment I am passing through a period of crisis in

my life. (…) I want to discipline my life (and, consequently, my work) as

it is in a state of anarchy. I say anarchy because of the very excess of

“living forces” in action and conflict, and in interconnected and divergent

evolution. I don’t know if I am being perfectly clear. I believe that I am

being sincere. I have, at least, that bitterness of spirit that comes from the

anti-social practice of sincerity. Yes, I should be sincere.]

For Joel Serrão, who compiled and published Pessoa’s letters to Côrtes-Rodrigues, the

above declaration is enough to convince him that Pessoa, from his personal

correspondence and extending through his entire written oeuvre, is indeed as sincere as

he admonishes himself to be. Serrão defines sincerity as the truthful expression of one’s

feelings and ideas. He quickly points out, however, that without a clear understanding of

one’s own feelings and ideas, as might occur in a complex mind, “ou de génio doentio”

10

[or that of a troubled genius], such as “our Fernando Pessoa (12),” those feelings and

ideas often befuddle themselves making a sincere expression seem contradictory and

deliberately misleading.

Serrão dedicates the introduction of his collection of correspondence to proving

Pessoa’s passive sincerity. The argument, a myriad of excuses for the “génio doentio”

and for his mis-interpreters, is just as befuddled and contradictory as the poet whose

earnestness Serrão seeks to defend. Pessoa’s personal letters are sincere, he claims,

except for the famed letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro describing the genesis of the

heteronyms because Casais Monteiro was a potential critic rather than Pessoa’s literary

colleague and friend. The Casais Monteiro letter, Serrão claims, is “menos sincera e mais

‘literária,’ [less sincere and more literary],” because in it Pessoa employs his most

effective misdirecting tool, irony. Parenthetically Serrão adds, “Sabendo, como sabemos,

que a ironia é um dos traços fundamentais da personalidade de Pessoa, não será de

admitir que as afirmações dessa carta mais difíceis de interpretar e unificar sejam de raiz

irónica? (18). [Knowing, as we do, that irony is one of the fundamental traits of Pessoa’s

personality, would it not be right to admit that the affirmations of this letter that are more

difficult to interpret and unify stem from ironic roots?] According to Serrão, the Casais

Monteiro letter is not the only piece of writing in which readers should not look for

“sincerity.” The poem “Autopsicografia,” or “O poeta é um fingidor” [The poet is a

pretender] is not to be taken straightforwardly either (16-17). The heteronyms, however,

are indeed sincere manifestations of Pessoa’s dramatic psychology, just as King Lear was

and is sincerely part of William Shakespeare (23-24).

11

Sincerity is difficult to discern when most of what is known about the man in

question comes from his own pen, and whether or not Serrão is accurate in his

distinctions between Pessoa’s honest, “literary,” and ironic instances is not as important

as it is interesting. What Serrão seems to be arguing is that in the literary realm of poems

and correspondence crafted for the critic, irony is welcome and must not be overlooked.

However, in the realm of actuality, the realm of personal letters and psychological

confessions, irony has no place, for if one were to deceive in his personal letters and

confessions, he would be a “mistificador inconcebível” [inconceivable mystifier], and

such a person would be incapable of composing a body of works “que brilha de

sinceridade como o aço duma espada polida” (13) [that shines with sincerity like the steel

of a polished sword.]

Serrão’s sincerity syndrome is exemplary of other Portuguese scholarship and the

overloaded effects of an honest emphasis placed on the gravity of Pessoa’s poetic

contribution. Antônio Quadros cites another passage from a letter to Côrtes-Rodrigues in

an attempt to defend a straightforward reading of Pessoa’s heteronyms and inevitably a

literal reading of what Pessoa writes about them. The letter is dated January of 1915:

Mantenho, é claro, o meu propósito de lançar pseudonicamente a obra

Caeiro-Reis-Campos. Isso é toda uma literature que eu criei e vivi, que é

sincera, porque é sentida, e que constitui uma corrente com influênica

possível, benéfica incontestavalmente, nas almas dos outros. […] Isso é

sentido na pessoa do outro; é escrito dramaticamente, mas é sincero (no

meu grave sentido da palavra) como é sincero o que diz o Rei Lear, que

não é Shakespeare, mas uma criação dele. Chamo insinceras às coisas

12

feitas para fazer pasmar, e às coisas, também—repare nisto, que é

importante—que não contém uma fundamental idéia metafísica, isto é, por

onde nada passa, ainda que como um vento, uma noção da gravidade e do

mistério da Vida. Por isso é serio tudo o que escrevi sob os nomes de

Caeiro, Reis, Álvaro de Campos. Em qualquer destes pus um profundo

conceito da vida, diverso em todos três, mas em todos gravemente atento à

importância misteriosa de existir. (46)

[I maintain, it is certain, my purpose of pseudonymously sending forth the

works of Caeiro-Reis-Campos. This consists of a literature that I created

and lived, and it is sincere because it is felt, and because it constitutes a

chain of possible influence and uncontestable benefit to the souls of

others. (…) It is felt in the person of the other; it is written dramatically,

but it is sincere (in my gravest sense of the word) just as what King Lear

says is sincere, who is not Shakespeare, but his creation. I call those

things insincere that are made to shock, and also those things—note this

because it is important—that do not contain a fundamental metaphysical

idea, that is, through which cannot pass, although like a gust of wind, a

notion of gravity and of the mystery of Life. For this reason, everything I

wrote under the names of Caeiro, Reis, and Álvaro de Campos is serious.

In any one of these I put a profound concept of life, diverse in all three,

but in all I put grave attention to the mysterious importance of existence.]

13

In his 1985 publication, Fernando Pessoa, O Poeta Singular e Plural, João Alves das

Neves includes Quadros’s article “A Criação Heteronímica” in which Quadros claims

critics have disregarded Pessoa’s grave assertions at sincerity by relegating the creation

of and the ideas presented by the heteronyms to spheres of the literary, fictional, and

provocative. Pessoa’s sincerity is significant, Quadros argues, because it reveals a

superior knowledge of the complexity of the psychological workings of the “I” (Neves

172). Undoubtedly the views of the heteronyms provide sincere possibilities of thought,

and Pessoa most definitely raises serious questions about the positing of the “I,” but these

questions certainly call to mind Fichte and the influence his observations had on the

development of romantic irony.

In a 1980 publication, Ronald M. Sousa seeks to clarify the dilemma of Pessoa’s

sincerity, a dilemma he argues begins with the poet himself. What seems to throw

scholars into confusion, Sousa argues, is Pessoa’s own preoccupation with the question

“Am I being sincere?” “That simple formulation,” Sousa says, “should have put a

definitive end to the mixture of ranting and marveling concerning the supposed ethical

question about ‘sincerity’ (72). Instead, critics such as Adolfo Casais Monteiro and Joel

Serrão have taken Pessoa’s diverting lead and extended to an entire corpus of literature

what Sousa argues is of personal and psychological origin. The issue has less to do with

the establishment of the heteronyms and the development of his poetic project than it

does with Pessoa’s personal existential dilemma. It seems, then, that an open, serious yet

ironic spotlight on not only Pessoa’s oeuvre but his poetic life as well might constitute

areas of meaning just as valid as those that exclude an ironic perspective of the whole

project in the dogmatic interest of “sincerity.” Even Serrão’s sincere critical statements

14

have an added depth when read with the irony I believe is there. His introduction

contains a sub-heading entitled “A POESIA HETERÓNIMA É TÃO SINCERA

QUANTO A ORTÓNIMA” [THE HETERONYMIC POEMS ARE AS SINCERE AS

THOSE BY FERNANDO PESSOA ‘ORTÓNIMO’]. Of course they are; but what about

Fernando Pessoa, “ortónimo”?

Jacinto Prado Coelho argues the other end of the debate in one of his earlier

works on Pessoa. He found in the poet’s varied writings, among clear claims to the

contrary, a pervasive unity among the heteronyms. In his book Diversidade e Unidade

em Fernando Pessoa [Diversity and Unity in Fernando Pessoa] Coelho begins by briefly

acknowledging the diverse characteristics—biographical, physiological, stylistic, and

topical—of each of the major heteronyms—Caeiro, Reis, Campos, “ortónimo,” and

Bernardo Soares—and such an approach to reading Pessoa has since become the most

common. However, Coelho dedicates most of his analysis to revealing the unifying

elements—stylistic, topical, semantic, and syntactic—found throughout the works of the

heteronyms that undermine the poet’s avid assertions that the heteronymic project was

something beyond his control. The author’s preface begins,

[…] Fernando Pessoa concebeu o projecto de se ocultar na criação

voluntária, fingindo indivíduos independents dele—os heterónimos—, e

inculcando-os como produtos dum imperativo alheio à sua vontade: eles o

teriam forçado a escrever, na atitude submissa do medium, a poesia

heterónima. Mas como esconder um homem? Esta pergunta, atribuída por

Valéry a Cervantes, tem aqui plena oportunidade. Um homem da estirpe

de Pessoa, ao esconder-se, revela-se; põe a nu a complexidade exemplar

15

da sua vida profunda. E que interesse palpitante não assumir a descoberta

dum homem assim!

[(…) Fernando Pessoa conceived the project of concealing himself in

voluntary creation—feigning individuals independent of himself—the

heteronyms—, and inculcating them as products of an imperative beyond

his will: they would have forced him to write, in the submissive attitude

of a medium, the heteronymic poetry. But how does one hide a man?

This question, attributed through Valéry to Cervantes, has absolute

application here. A man of Pessoa’s stock, in hiding himself, reveals

himself; laying bare the exemplary complexity of his profound life. And

what palpitating interest is not peaked by the discovery of a man such as

this!]

Coelho’s work admonishes Pessoa scholars not to believe everything they read, including

and especially what Pessoa has written outside the generally perceived realm of

“literature.” He reminds readers that Caeiro, Reis, Campos and the others, although

diverse, are undoubtedly all one person. Coelho, however, also falls short of recognizing

Pessoa’s genius by denying the heteronyms the reality Pessoa is able to establish for

them. The unity of their works may reveal one man composed them, but even syntactic,

semantic, and topical unity does not account for the diversity of possible “life views”

presented by the heteronyms, nor can such unity lead to the “discovery,” in the traditional

sense, of their creator. Building on Coelho’s claims of Pessoa’s “feigned” feebleness of

will, but taking that “feigning” in a different direction, and similarly building on the

16

seriousness with which Pessoa created and presented his heteronyms and their respective

views, I seek to show how Pessoa playfully redirects and misdirects his readers in a spiral

game of infinite deferral of identity, culminating in the ultimate indefinite masking and

unmasking of his own.

Wayne Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony lays out clues and strategies for identifying and

reconstructing rhetorical irony. One of Booth’s main arguments involves the necessity of

authorial intention for accurately reading irony. Booth writes, “No matter how firmly I

am convinced that a statement is absurd or illogical or just plain false, I must somehow

determine whether what I reject is also rejected by the author, and whether he has reason

to expect my concurrence” (11). Fully aware of the “intentional fallacy,” Booth makes a

distinction between the author and the implied author and between the intentions of the

works themselves. Paramount throughout his presentation is the relationship between the

implied author and the implied reader, and the more the reader knows about the author

and his other works, the more certain the reader can be when venturing to declare an

irony. Thus the advocates for Pessoa’s literal sincerity claim that personal

correspondence and “journalesque” auto-interpretive confessionals validate the earnest

nature of their author, while others, not wanting to be trumped by Pessoa, will argue they

occupy a place beside him and a share in the mockery of those who do not understand.

Fernando Pessoa’s works, however, are not easily circumscribed by the notion of

an implied author simply because of the multiple authorship implicit in Pessoa’s very

name. Booth’s techniques are limited when applied to Pessoa for there is more at stake in

Pessoa’s world than finding an irony and reconstructing it so that privileged ironic

readers can sit with the author on his higher plane looking down on the victims that are

17

not privy to the humor involved.6 To claim that one poem, or a few poems, or a part of a

certain poem or certain number of poems is ironic, and then to analyze the dimensions

and implications of such a claim might function quite well with any other poet. Pessoa

resists such an exclusionary analysis of irony. That ironic instances are found in many, if

not all, of Pessoa’s heteronyms and their respective works indicates a larger ironic project

that is Pessoa’s heteronymic system itself and the presentation of an poetic reality based

on sustained distance and the play that goes on within that space, a project more involved

than what is encompassed by Booth’s seminal study.

Enormous risks are involved when labeling something “ironic,” especially when

what is termed ironic extends from literary excerpts to an entire existence, for it could

potentially destabilize any straightforward reading of anything, receding into an infinity

of ironies with no hope of ever determining from what specific platform the ironic

inversion first originated. Yet merely mentioning the name Fernando Pessoa begs for

critical clarification—Pessoa “ortónimo,” Pessoa the critic, Pessoa/Campos, or Pessoa the

Puppeteer who sits above them all? With so many Pessoas at large, albeit in a very

controlled space, I maintain that the excitement comes not only from profiling and

chasing each one, it also is present when recognizing we are tracking merely shadows of

an elusive genius. The game is one of resisted definition, of infinite openness, an

openness made possible only by irony and distance. Alongside Kierkegaard’s “irony”

and “faith,” and preceding Jacques Derrida’s “hospitality” and “gift,” Fernando Pessoa’s

heteronymic project posits that selfhood is intangible, indefinable and just as infinitely

open as is the irony upon which the entire project is based.

6 See Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony, especially chapters 1and 2.

18

In offering a very late re-reading of Pessoa, I take advantage of postmodern

literary and critical developments of the concept of irony to open possibilities heretofore

under-explored that may constitute meaningful insights into Portugal’s now most

celebrated modern poet. Alan Wilde writes of the postmodern-ironic connection:

Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating

indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the

necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a

straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodernity, in its twisted

posture, seems to be the awareness of this paradox, and consequently of

the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion (4-5).

Convinced his purpose was to usher in a new era of Portuguese imperial, cultural

domination, and aware of his anachronistic modernity, Fernando Pessoa configured and

baffled in a paradoxical attempt to address and avoid his role as a midwife of a post-

modern post-modernity.

Chapter one is devoted to analysis of the interaction of the ironic rhetoric

employed in the poems, internal irony, with what I call irony from without, or external

irony, meaning the irony found in Pessoa’s prose, whether literary, critical or personal,

and how that interaction allows for the establishment of fictional subjects. Chapter two

discusses the necessary element of eros as it is identified with irony, specifically in the

case of the heteronyms, to provide the corporeality and physicality that gives them their

reality. In chapter three, the issues of realness and actuality are approached from the

perspective of Pessoa’s, or rather Bernardo Soares’s, unfinished novel, O Livro do

Desassossego and Kierkegaard’s “dialectic of imagination,” as David J. Gouwens calls it.

19

Finally, chapter four is an exploration of how irony is integral to understanding both

Kierkegaardian and Pessoan philosophies of selfhood, with specific treatment of

Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms.

In researching for this paper, I cannot claim to have exhausted prior scholarship of

Pessoa, Kierkegaard, and irony. In fact, I arguably have made incursions into these areas

too miniscule even to be notable. The obvious dangers of such limitations are inevitable

gaps, gaps that further research might fill with supportive elements or widen with

contradictory proof. I cannot beg excuse from these limitations, but if my insights can

spark any discourse at all, negative or positive, I will consider them contributive, if even

in the smallest sense of the word.

Toward the end of Kierkegaard’s dissertation he praises the individual who

succeeds in “poetically composing” himself through irony, praise of which Pessoa, whose

name means “persona” or “mask,” is most certainly worthy.

What takes the ironist’s time, however, is the solicitude he employs in

dressing himself in the costume proper to the poetic character he has

poetically composed for himself. Here the ironist is very well informed

and consequently has a considerable selection of masquerade costumes

from which to choose. At times he walks around with the proud air of a

Roman patrician wrapped in a bordered toga, or he sits in the sella curulis

with imposing Roman earnestness; at times he conceals himself in the

humble costume of a penitent pilgrim; then again he sits with his legs

crossed like a Turkish pasha in his harem; at times he flutters about as

light and free as a bird in the role of an amorous zither player. This is

20

what the ironist means when he says that one should live poetically; this is

what he achieves by poetically composing himself. (282-83)

In donning his masquerade costumes and giving his creations vitality, Fernando Pessoa

raises his fictional selves to his own level of actuality, simultaneously transforming his

own life into an immortal poem. One of Pessoa’s “inéditas:”

Sou um evadido.

Logo que nasci

Fecharam-me em mim,

Ah, mas eu fugi.

Se a gente se cansa

Do mesmo lugar,

Do mesmo ser

Por que não se cansar?

Minha alma procura-me

Mas eu ando a monte.

Oxalá que ela

Nunca me encontre.

Ser um é cadeia,

Ser eu é não ser.

Viverei fugindo

21

Mas vivo a valer. (Obra Poética [711]; hereafter cited as OP)

[I’m a runaway.

When I was born

They shut me up

Inside myself.

Ah, but I ran away.

If people get sick

Of living in

The same old place,

Why not of living

In the same old skin?

My soul is on

The lookout for me,

But I lie low.

Will it ever find me?

Never, I hope!

Being myself only

Means being pinned down

And no one at all.

22

I’ll live on the run,

And really live!] (Poems of Fernando Pessoa 160)

23

Sabendo, como sabemos, que a ironia é um dos traços fundamentais da personalidade de

Pessoa […]. Joel Serrão

The more irony is present, the more freely and poetically the poet floats above his artistic

work. Therefore, irony is not present at some particular point of the poem but is

omnipresent in it, so that the irony visible in the poem is in turn ironically controlled.

Therefore irony simultaneously makes the poem and the poet free. But in order for this

to happen, the poet himself must be master over the irony. Søren Kierkegaard

There is something extremely vile in the modern mind; people who tolerate every kind of

unworthy lie in real life, and all kinds of unworthy realities, will not tolerate the existence

of the fable. And that is what Pessoa’s oeuvre is: a fable, a fiction. To forget that Caeiro,

Reis and Campos are poetic creations is to forget too much. Like all creation, these poets

were born of play. Art is play—and other things. But without play there is no art.

Octavio Paz

Poetry is the establishing of being by means of the word. Martin Heidegger

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Chapter One

Interacting Irony: The Poetic Heteronyms

“Controlled Irony” One need only read selections of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry to find oneself

included in the “us” of Joel Serrão, the “us” that acknowledges, with almost disdainful

obviousness, a personality prone to irony. It should not surprise “us” then that irony is

the very device by which Pessoa establishes his multiple literary personalities and

through which he succeeds in negating his own subjectivity. The prose pieces attributed

to the poetic heteronyms are an integral part of the literary irony found throughout their

poems and must not be excluded when considering the poetry. In very general terms, and

at the risk of being overly simplistic, I make the distinction between the irony found

within the poetry of the heteronyms and the irony surrounding their prose pieces by

labeling them respectively internal and external irony. These terms are somewhat

misleading since the prose is certainly not external to Pessoa’s literary opus. It is,

interestingly, often considered a secondary part, if considered a part at all, of the

“complete works” of the poetic heteronyms. Most important, however, is that readers

maintain open enough intellectual space in their imaginations to remember that despite

the names, biographies, and psychologies evidenced in the poetry and prose they read,

one “P”essoa composed them all. For as Octavio Paz has observed, to forget that the

heteronyms are poetic creations is to forget too much.

These two authorial removals—poetry assigned to a personality other than its

author’s and prose about the poetry of that “other” assigned to yet another personality—

25

compound the irony at play raising it to a higher level. The distances resulting from each

removal are the arenas of ironic play and are the spaces from which has emerged the

general acceptance of Pessoa’s fictional personalities within historical actuality. Darlene

Sadlier calls Pessoa’s project a “verbal game” while admitting, “[…] Pessoa was not one

author but many, each of whom deserves a place in modern literary history” (1).

Through his exponential use of irony Pessoa has managed what no other has, to occupy

multiple spaces on the list of historical literary contributors. Is that not the most ironic

feature of all—that we have followed Pessoa’s lead and grounded, honored even,

fictional people in historical actuality? Perhaps Pessoa does deserve multiple recognition

for such an accomplishment. Before presenting the implications of selfhood inherent in

the interaction of internal and external ironies in Pessoa’s heteronyms’s works, an appeal

to Kierkegaard and his understanding of the role of irony in poetics and life might serve

to clarify the distinctions I have made.

The last six pages of The Concept of Irony are devoted to the development of

what Kierkegaard calls “controlled irony.” It is when irony is brought under “control,”

explains Richard M. Summers, that Kierkegaard reveals an early development of his

theory of self, a theory that certainly has application to Pessoa and the process of

establishing his heteronymns. Controlled irony is Kierkegaard’s ethical response to the

wild and harmful effects of romantic irony. Throughout his dissertation Kierkegaard

maintains that irony, inasmuch as Socrates is irony and is a negative concept, is a

historically justified form of subjectivity but not subjectivity itself, which is a positive

concept. Departing from Hegel who holds that Socrates was subjectivity, Kierkegaard

argues Socrates “had the idea as boundary,” (The Concept of Irony 169; hereafter cited as

26

CI) and was therefore completely negative and negatively free. Socrates did have some

positivity because he represented something new, but that positivity remained as potential

and was never brought to actuality. Socrates as a midwife, and as irony, ushered in the

new principle, which, according to Kierkegaard, was subjectivity and ideality (CI 297).

Kierkegaard’s complaint of romantic irony was that in its freedom, reality was abandoned

for a “self-created actuality,” which was an “exaggerated subjectivity” (CI 275)

exemplified in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the works of Tieck. Although he feels

Solger is duped by Hegel’s positive system, Kierkegaard recognizes that Solger, as

evidenced in his Lectures on Aesthetics, manages to understand that irony frees the artist

from subjective bias and personal interest allowing the artist to achieve a state of

“indifference” and “objectivity” (Summers 303-04). This background sets the tone for

Kierkegaard’s theory of the self, for selfhood is achieved through the objectivity made

possible by “controlled” irony.

Kierkegaard opens his discussion of controlled irony by referring to Shakespeare,

praising him for relating himself ironically to his creations and doing so, “precisely in

order to let the objective dominate” (CI 324). Paraphrasing Kierkegaard, Summers

explains how irony can allow the objective to dominate.

Within the work [irony] enables the right balance to be achieved between

the disparate elements and here, as Kierkegaard notes, the greater the

contrasts involved, the greater the need there is for irony to master them

(CI, 324). But irony also needs to be present in the relation between the

artistic work and its creator, where its task is to set the poet free from his

creation, letting him float above it in Kierkegaard’s image (CI, 324). […]

27

The task of the literary artist, according to Kierkegaard, is to achieve in his

creation a presentation of the particular subject matter that is free of any

traces of the author’s “subjectivity” in the form of personal opinions and

predilections that have no place in the economy of the work he is creating.

(304-05)

Thus irony must be present not only in the artistic work itself, but the artist’s relation to

that work must be sustained by irony as well. Kierkegaard then praises Goethe for his

exemplary use of controlled irony. He writes, “On the one hand the individual poem

rounds itself off in itself by means of the irony in it; on the other hand, the individual

poetic work emerges as an element, and thereby the whole poet-existence rounds itself

off by means of irony” (CI 325). That for which Kierkegaard praises Goethe is what I

will show Pessoa achieves just as skillfully.

Mastering the irony from within and outside one’s poetry, Kierkegaard warns,

“does not always mean that just because a poet manages to be master over the irony at the

time of writing he is master over it in the actuality to which he himself belongs” (CI 324).

Here Kierkegaard begins his transition into his theory of self. The problems inherent in

romantic irony resurface. Historical actuality, Kierkegaard explains, “stands in twofold

relation to the subject: partly as a gift that refuses to be rejected, partly as a task that

wants to be fulfilled” (CI 276), and cannot be ignored or abandoned for the imaginary as

did the romantic ironists. Being grounded in actuality is particularly important for the

poet, Summers explains, because “it is also a response to the situation of modernity, […]

in which the poet has to operate in a fragmented world, with no underlying unified

worldview which he can simply take over. He is compelled rather to develop his own

28

view, to discover for himself the possibilities and limits of the historical context” (309).

The transition from the “self-created actuality” of the romantic ironists to the historically

grounded controlled irony, Summers points out, is the moment at which the self emerges

because “the ironic subject itself becomes the object of irony” (310). In an 1837 entry in

his journal Kierkegaard writes,

[I]rony is first surmounted when the individual, elevated above everything

and looking down from this position, is finally elevated beyond himself

and from this dizzy height sees himself in his nothingness, and thereby he

finds his true elevation. […] The ironical position is essentially: nil

admirari; but irony, when it slays itself, has disdained everything with

humor, itself included (Journals and Papers 2:1688).

Instead of fleeing the world in search of the ideal like the romantic ironist, the self of

controlled irony recognizes the need to bring ideality to its own actuality. The issue of

controlling irony is paradoxical for it would seem if irony is mastered, it ceases to be

irony, which is negative freedom. However, once irony has come under control and

helped to establish the self, its task is not complete. Summers says, “The task of irony is

now to set people free from illusions, pretensions, fixed ideas and unconscious

motivations, all of which it exposes. […] Thus controlled irony actively acknowledges

our need for others. It presupposes a community” (312-13). Furthermore, in a footnote

Summers makes the connection between Kierkegaard’s controlled irony and Handwerk’s

(Irony and Ethics) ethical irony in which Handwerk proposes the subject’s necessity for

interaction with others in order to realize his own identity (313).

29

Hopefully the implications these philosophical developments have for a more

profound understanding of Fernando Pessoa already have begun to take shape. Often it

has been argued that Pessoa created his own world filling it with ideas and people of his

own making. On closer scrutiny, Pessoa did not create a separate world; he merely

brought his creations into his own. Among the major poetic heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro,

Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos, there is often a fourth, Fernando Pessoa,

sometimes designated as “ele-mesmo,” “só,” or “ortónimo.” These individuals comment

upon each other and engage one another in critical exchanges and discourse. Álvaro de

Campos, the only heteronym to acknowledge the works and person of Fernando Pessoa,

is particularly critical of the poetry of Pessoa “ortónimo” and his impersonal approach to

relationships. After consulting with the stars,1 Pessoa’s heteronyms were born within a

few years of himself and lived in the areas including and surrounding Lisbon, where

Pessoa spent his entire adult life. Although Fernando Pessoa (“ele-mesmo”?) was a part

of his own poetic community, it was the task of his creations to set him free from them,

and his own task to remove from them any trace of his own subjectivity. In this manner,

Pessoa controls the irony, internally and externally, and through it all a self emerges to

discover it is floating above his own nothingness.

The Poetic Community Fernando Pessoa “ortónimo”

The personality with the name Fernando Pessoa “ortónimo” above all serves as a

method for grounding the other heteronyms in historical actuality. As a heteronym,

1 Pessoa was fascinated with astrology and the occult, and many documents evidence he drew up horoscopes for his heteronyms, specifically Caeiro and Reis (Obras em Prosa 90-91).

30

Pessoa “ortónimo” is more elusive than the others. Perhaps the elusiveness comes in

deciding whether or not Pessoa “ortónimo” refers to the genuine biographical Pessoa, if

there is in fact a determinable and captured group of characteristics that we can call the

real Pessoa, or if the “ortónimo” is simply another creation in the cast of dramatists. As

mentioned above, Álvaro de Campos is the only heteronym to refer to Fernando Pessoa

as if he knew him personally as well as professionally. In fact, Álvaro de Campos writes

a poem about O Marinheiro, a drama Pessoa published under his own name in the first

volume of Orpheu, a Lisbon-based literary journal Pessoa helped to organize.2 The poem

is entitled “To Fernando Pessoa” with a subscript: “Depois de ler o seu drama estático O

Marinheiro em Orpheu 1” [After reading your static drama O Marinheiro in Orpheu 1].

The text is as follows:

Depois de doze minutos

Do seu drama O Marinheiro,

Em que os mais ágeis e astutos

Se sentem com sono e brutos,

E de sentido nem cheiro,

Diz uma das veladoras

Com langorosa magia:

De eterno e belo há apenas o sonho.

Por que estamos nós falando ainda?

Ora isso mesmo é que eu ia

Perguntar a essas senhoras…(OP [444])

2 The drama is dated “11/12 Outubro, 1913” appearing in the 1915 edition of Orpheu subtitled “Drama Estático em um Quadro.” It is exactly that, static and unmoving, undoubtedly fulfilling its intended aesthetic purpose.

31

[After twelve minutes

Of your drama O Marinheiro,

In which the most agile and astute

Find themselves sleepy and sluggish,

Almost completely senseless,

One of the mourners says

With languid fascination:

Of the eternal and beautiful there is only the dream

Why are we still talking?

Well this is exactly what I was going

To ask these women…]

Also, in Campos’ Posfácio: Notas para a Recordação de meu mestre Caeiro [Postscript:

Notes for the Remembrance of my master Caeiro], Campos laments that he was not

present at Caeiro’s feet when his master passed away. He writes he was in England, and

that Ricardo Reis was back in Brazil. Fernando Pessoa, Campos admits, was in Lisbon,

“mas é como se não estivesse. O Fernando Pessoa sente as coisas mas não se mexe, nem

mesmo por dentro” (OP 249) [but it was the same as if he had not been (in Lisbon).

Fernando Pessoa feels things but does not stir himself, not even inside]. Interestingly,

Ophélia Queiroz recalls that Pessoa admitted the very same thing to her about himself

verbatim (Cartas de Amor 40). Even in his personal correspondence, Fernando Pessoa

had to distinguish “himself.” Immediately after writing the thirty or so poems that make

up the core of Alberto Caeiro’s Guardador de Rebanhos, Pessoa tells Casais Monteiro,

he took out another piece of paper and wrote the six poems that make up Chuva Obliqua

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by Fernando Pessoa. Of this experience he says, “Foi o regresso de Fernando Pessoa

Alberto Caeiro a Fernando Pessoa elle só. Ou, melhor, foi a reacção de Fernando Pessoa

contra a sua inexistência como Alberto Caeiro” (Monteiro 233). [It was the return of

Fernando Pessoa Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself alone. Or, better, it was

Fernando Pessoa’s reaction against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.] Earlier in the

letter, Pessoa remarks that he intended to publish some of his works from which he would

have to exclude works by the other three poetic heteronyms for the sake of publishing

work written under his own name. The poetry of the others, Caeiro, Reis, and Campos,

he confesses, would have to wait for publication “quando me fôr dado o Prémio Nobel”

(Monteiro 233) [when I am awarded the Nobel Prize]. Whether the name Fernando

Pessoa “ele só” represents all, some, or none of the poet, Pessoa certainly used his own

name to establish an identity that he planned to challenge and enhance later with all the

other identities he had invited into his community. He did not need a Nobel Prize to

accomplish his designs, just a premature death and an unresolved mystery of identity.

Since the poems written under his own name were to be what would spread

Pessoa’s fame from Portugal to Sweden and then to the world, Cancioneiro is much more

difficult to categorize thematically than the poems of the other heteronyms. One is

unable to detect in Cancioneiro the pedagogical persuasions of Caeiro, the dogmatic

assertions of Reis, or the unrestrained passion of Campos. Instead, because of these

poems, Pessoa is often considered a poet-philosopher. Regardless, there is enough from

within the body of the works attributed to himself as well as from without that resonates

with an echo that betrays ironic distancing. Unlike the other heteronyms with which

irony appears in the interaction of what they and Pessoa claim them to be and what they

33

really are, Pessoa “ortónimo” is playing a game with all the poets of the past and future,

with poetic immortality, and with his role in the world as poet, philosopher, and creator.

This is how Pessoa grounds “ele-mesmo” in his own actuality.

Since the advent of poetry the poet has tried to define himself and his role in the

great historical process. Commenting on the poetry of Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger has

written:

Who accomplishes this naming of the gods? Who lays hold of something

permanent in ravenous time and fixes it in the world? Hölderlin tells us

with the sure simplicity of the poet. […] In this way the essence of poetry

is joined onto the laws of the signs of the gods and of the voice of the

people, laws which tend toward and away from each other. The poet

himself stands between the former—the gods, and the latter—the people.

He is the one who has been cast out—out into that Between, between gods

and men. (Heidegger 761,764)

As the philosophers discover new ways to define the historical process, the poet stands in

a space isolated from time and place, situated, perhaps as Heidegger suggests, between

the gods and the people. Fernando Pessoa delighted in this isolation and frequently

retired to the space within which he enjoyed the company and critical discussions of his

creations. Pessoa certainly knew of his own genius and imagined his role as that of

Portugal’s preeminent poet and the harbinger of a new era of glory. He envisioned

himself as inspiring the motivating hope needed to usher in a new age of Portuguese

cultural dominance, what he called “O Quinto Império” [The Fifth Empire]. By noting

the imperialistic tone of Mensagem, a poem that rivals Camões’s Renaissance epic Os

34

Lusíadas in proclaiming Potugual’s glory, and by his self-designation as a “supra-

Camões,” we can attribute to Pessoa a premonitory understanding of his vast and

influential role as poet.

I hesitate to extract single poems from the body of Cancioneiro because each

piece has its own tone and timbre and shines light on a different facet of the Poet of

Personae, and what is only a part of the body should not be understood as making up the

whole. With that it mind, of Pessoa’s many self-discovery poems in the Cancioneiro,

two in particular address quite explicitly the role of the poet, and by the very title

“Autopsicografia” we know that “poet” is another name Pessoa “ele-mesmo” claims for

himself, unlike Alberto Caeiro who eschews the designation. The role of the poet

according to “Autopsicografia” is that he can control irony. “O Poeta é um fingidor,”

[The Poet is a pretender] the poem opens. He is not merely an amateur “fingidor,” but

“[f]inge tão completamente / Que chega a fingir que é dor / A dor que deveras sente” (OP

[143]). [His pretending seems so real / That he will fake the ache / Which he can really

feel.] To Anne Cruz, an American scholar who specializes in Spanish literature but has

written about Pessoa, “Autopsicografia” is another example of one of Fernando Pessoa’s

masks, and this time it is rhetoric that is doing the masking. For her analysis of the poem,

Cruz uses Richard Lanham’s model of two contrasting types of life, the rhetorical ideal of

life and the philosophical life. Cruz places Pessoa among the rhetoricians, the actors

whose mode of being is insincerity. She says, “The [rhetorical] poet’s language renders

significance and form to the chaotic reality around him, only to lose its signifying quality

and revert to pure playfulness,” and in moving toward pure playfulness the reader is

motivated to find meaning in the poet’s words (56). “Autopsicografia” is situated amidst

35

the tension between play and purpose. Cruz extrapolates from the text that the poet

pretends to feel nothing in order to move the reader, because in feeling nothing the poet

can connect better with the reader’s intellect. The poet uses his poem to inspire the

reader’s emotions, but all for the purpose of entertaining the reader’s “razão.” Not only

is the poet manipulative, but also he is ostentatious, celebrating in his powers of

creation—the creation of fictional emotions and experiences through verbal play.

Pessoa can certainly be called playful and even rhetorical. However, if

“rhetorical” is, as Lanham claims, the opposite of philosophical, it might be

inappropriately applied to Pessoa’s work and self. In fact, we do not have to go too far to

find among the influential philosophers of the late nineteenth century sentiments quite

similar to those of our pretending poet. A study by Jorge de Sena presented in Brazil in

1959 links the ideas presented in “Autopsicografia” with strands of Nietzschean thought.

Among Nietzsche’s poetic works Sena discoveres three seemingly simple lines that apply

well to Pessoa’s art. Nietzsche’s poem is as follows:

Die Bösen

Der Dichter, der lügen kann

Wissentlich, willentlich,

Der kann allein Wahrheit reden.

Jorge de Sena’s translation:

Os Maus

O poeta capaz de mentir

Conscientemente, voluntariamente,

Só ele é capaz de dizer a Verdade.

36

[The Bad Ones

The poet who can lie

Consciously, voluntarily,

Only he can tell the Truth.]

According to Nietzsche, then, in order for a poet to be able to relate truth, he must

be able to lie consciously and voluntarily. Sena explains that this “mentir” [ability to lie]

entails much more than “criar ficções” [to invent fictions] or even more than “fingir” [to

pretend], rather the poet’s voluntary and conscious lie refers “à ordem da expressão

autêntica de um conhecimento do Mundo” [to the order of authentic expression of

Worldly knowledge] because “só ele [o poeta] será capaz de atingir, tão mais perto

quanto possível, uma verdade não perturbada pelas circunstâncias factuais da criação”

(Sena 120) [only he (the poet) will be able to attain, as closely as possible, a truth

impenetrable by the actual circumstances of creation]. Here we find ourselves entering

the space of the poet, the space that allows him to mediate, perhaps between the language

of the gods and the voice of the people, in order to communicate truth. This space, the

space through which truth is received and then transmitted, is opened by the capacity to

deceive consciously and willfully.

As for Pessoa the “fingidor,” at first glance one might dismiss an application of

Nietzsche’s lines completely, for Pessoa outright admits that the poet engages his

capacity for pretending in order to persuade his readers, whereas Nietzsche’s poet draws

his power from the potential to pretend, situated in the impregnated space wherein truth

37

and falsehood, for a moment, are the same. However, in Pessoa’s poem “Isto,” we find

reconciliation. The first stanza:

Dizem que finjo ou minto

Tudo que escrevo. Não.

Eu simplesmente sinto

Com a imaginação.

Não uso o coração. (OP [144])

[They say I fake or lie

All I write. Not a bit.

It is simply that I

Feel with my mind and wit.

No heart comes into it.] (Centenary Pessoa 43)

In juxtaposing these two poems, “Autopsicografia” and “Isto,” Pessoa first affirms that

the poet does indeed have the capacity to fake pain, love, and joy, and to deceive, making

the reader feel what he himself never felt. However, the poet responds with quiet

assurance that although he has the capacity to “fingir” or “mentir” he subscribes to

neither, gathering his feelings solely from his imagination. The paradox lies in the

contradiction between the real and the imagined, something I discuss at length below.3

Appealing to Nietzsche, in Jorge de Sena’s Portuguese, “…sem o reconhecimento das

ficções lógicas, sem uma comparação da realidade com o mundo puramente imaginado

do absoluto e do imutável…o homem não poderia viver” (Sena 122) [without recognizing

logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the 3 See chapter three.

38

absolute and immutable…man could not live]. Pessoa as poet does not deceive, pretend,

fake, or lie when he writes from the imagination. On the contrary he is mediator between

the gods and the people because it is precisely knowledge and understanding of worlds

imagined that brings reality and truth to light. He can secure the permanent in ravenous

time. The poet Pessoa continues in the second stanza of “Isto”:

Tudo o que sonho ou passo,

O que me falha ou finda,

É como que um terraço Sobre outra coisa ainda.

Essa coisa é que é linda.

[All that I dream or suffer,

That hurts, hastens my end,

Is like a ledge above a Beauty that lies beyond.

To this I am constrained.] (Centenary Pessoa 43)

The image of the terrace or ledge describes the poet’s removal from that which is around

him, from the reality of the world, and elevates him to a space, the space of imagination,

“mentira,” and controlled irony that prepares him to commune with the gods. This is the

beautiful, the aesthetic, and from this space, from his potential to pretend, the poet can

see differently since he is both within and above his historical actuality seeing both

himself and his own nothingness. The poet is a “fingidor,” he has to be, but he neither

“finge” nor “mente” rather he simply stands in Between. For, as Álvaro de Campos later

39

says, “Fingir é conhecer-se” (Páginas de Doutrina 169) [To pretend is to know oneself].

By pretending and misdirecting, by becoming one person only to become yet another,

Fernando Pessoa left a mystery of actual identity that has proven irresistible.

Alberto Caeiro

The metaphysical proposals of the poems printed under the name of Alberto

Caeiro together with the prose praise given him by Pessoa and the other heteronyms

offers perhaps the most blatant instantiation of interacting irony. Born in 1889 and an

orphan at an early age, Caeiro spent his short life (he died of tuberculosis at the age of

twenty-six) with an elderly aunt in the countryside, availing himself of little formal

education and following no profession (Monteiro 234). Physically fragile, of medium

height and fair-skinned with blue eyes, the simple Caeiro is named the “mestre” of the

poetic heteronyms including Fernando Pessoa “ele-mesmo.” Caeiro’s “philosophy” is a

rejection of all attempts at philosophy and ideas. His is a world where truth is readily

accessible through pure appreciation of nature, and where trees are vastly more important

than ideas. He writes, “É preciso também não ter filosofia nenhuma. / Com filosofia não

há árvores: há idéias apenas” (OP [261]). [It is necessary as well not to have any

philosophy. / With philosophy there are no trees: there are only ideas.] Since ideas are

inconsequential to Caeiro, it is no surprise that many of his poems exhort readers not to

think, for thinking is superfluous to the superior sense of sight: “O essencial é saber ver, /

Saber ver sem estar a pensar, / Saber ver quando se vê, / E nem pensar quando se vê /

Nem ver quando se pensa” (OP [229]). [The essential is to know how to see, / To know

how to see without being about to think, / To know how to see when seeing, / Neither

thinking when seeing / Nor seeing when thinking.] In celebrating sight, however, Caeiro

40

complicates his anti-philosophy philosophy. Beginning with Plato and continuing

through the development of Western philosophy, seeing has been identified with

understanding, understanding with reasoning, and reasoning with thinking. Rich with

irony, Caeiro exhorts his readers not to think, but to see only, stripping traditional thought

of its sense of vision, and subsequently its historical identity.

Alberto Caeiro’s personal style and simple syntax quickly and easily convince

readers that they just might be able to achieve the supreme state of pure seeing without

thinking. However, the inherent contradictions in all of Caeiro’s assertions are too

blatant for readers to be able to sustain the game for long. In fact, Caeiro is unable

himself not to think and to see things only as they really are on a consistent basis. Four

short poems found in the midst of Caeiro’s presentation of empiricism and pure visual

appreciation are surprisingly full of metaphors and personifications. Perhaps the most

outrageous of the four is “No meu prato que mistura de Natureza!” (OP [222]). [What a

mixture of Nature is on my plate!] Here Caeiro is consistent with his appreciation of

nature, but he takes it to a distorted extreme. The plants are our sisters, and oh how

unconsciously we eat them! Without thinking, we devour the most delicious salad greens,

when in truth they are our earliest siblings! After all the doctrine Caeiro has been

offering readers to this point, it is nearly impossible to miss the humor of his elaborate

frame for modest mockery. Caeiro has an explanation for his lapse into “literariness,”

and in fact warns the reader early that the poems that follow are “natural” yet contrary to

what he feels and what he is, simply because he wrote them while he was sick. He

rationalizes, “estando doente devo pensar o contrário / Do que penso quando estou são. /

41

(Senão não estaria doente)” (OP [220]). [When I’m sick I must think the opposite / Of

what I think when I am well. / (Otherwise I wouldn’t be sick.)] (Poems 17).

In an ideal world free from the natural consequences of human weakness,

everything, Caeiro asserts, must be understood for exactly what it is and must resist

metaphor, hyperbole, or any attempt at literary interpretation. For what more could “o

luar através dos altos ramos” be other than “o luar através dos altos ramos” (OP [240])!4

Periodically, however, the reader gets a sneak peek at particularly “pessoan” influences

that seem to indicate something silly is afoot, as in the first few lines of “Li hoje quase

duas páginas” (OP [233]).

Li hoje quase duas páginas

Do livro dum poeta místico,

E ri como quem tem chorado muito.

Os poetas místicos são filósofos doentes,

E os filósofos são homens doidos.

[Today I read nearly two pages

In a book by a mystic poet,

4 The poem is number XXXV of Guardador de Rebanhos. O Luar através dos altos ramos, [The moonlight behind the tall branches Dizem os poetas todos que ele é mais The poets all say is more Que o luar através dos altos ramos. Than the moonlight behind the tall branches. Mas para mim, que não sei o que penso, But for me, who do not know what I think— O que o luar através dos altos ramos What the moonlight behind the tall branches É, além de ser Is, beyond its being O luar através dos altos ramos, The moonlight behind the tall branches, É não ser mais Is its not being more Que o luar através dos altos ramos. Than the moonlight behind the tall branches] (Poems

21)

42

And I laughed like someone who’d been weeping and weeping.

Mystic poets are sick philosophers,

And philosophers are madmen.] (Poems 19)

Pessoa himself was very interested in the occult and in mysticism, and many of

the poems that make up Cancioneiro deal with the ineffable and intangible essences of

life and the universe. The metaphysical and philosophical ideals expressed in the poetry

attributed to Fernando Pessoa are in stark contrast to those expressed by Alberto Caeiro,

and in the poem above, Caeiro is setting his creator free by denying any philosophical

connection to him. Pessoa, in turn, creates a Caeiro completely void of any trace of his

personal predilections and ideas. Because Pessoa has invited Caeiro into his own

community, however, even further ironic distance is required, for Fernando Pessoa is

both “ortónimo” and ironic creator. Thus, with the same pen-stroke that he admits to

creating Caeiro, Pessoa acknowledges he has found his master. To Adolfo Casais

Monteiro, in the letter “less sincere than literary,”5 Pessoa writes, “Descuple-me o

absurdo da frase: aparecera em mim o meu mestre. Foi essa a sensação imediata que

tive” (Monteiro 232-233). [Excuse the absurdity of the phrase: my master appeared in

me. This was the immediate sensation I had.] All at once the irony is surmounted and

Pessoa floats above his heteronyms, including himself, and peers down on his own

nothingness.

5 Joel Serrão argues the letter to Casais Monteiro is “menos sincera e mais ‘literária’” (Serrão 18).

43

Ricardo Reis

Because Caeiro was the first of the major poetic heteronyms to come into

existence and because of the “ecstatic” circumstances surrounding his conception,6 it may

not be surprising that the subsequent heteronym is somewhat more of a deliberate

creation. Such is the case with Ricardo Reis. Born in Porto in 1887, one year before

Pessoa own birth and two years before Caeiro’s supposed birth, Ricardo Reis, shorter,

stronger and “dryer” than Caeiro, was educated by Jesuits, became a physician, and

frequently traveled to Brazil, finally moving there in 1919 in self-imposed exile because

of his monarchist political views (Monteiro 234). The circumstances of his conception,

however, are interlaced with the creation of Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa relates that following

the rush of inspiration resulting in Caeiro’s Guardador de Rebanhos, instinctively Pessoa

discovered disciples. He writes to Casais Monteiro, “Arranquei do seu [Caeiro’s] falso

paganismo o Ricardo Reis latente, descobri-lhe o nome, e ajustei-o a si mesmo, porque

nessa altura já o via” (233). [I pulled the latent Ricardo Reis from (Caeiro’s) false

paganism, came up with his name, and adjusted it to him, for at that point, I was already

seeing him] (Sadlier 89). Reis later composed over 125 odes in classical style with

classical themes.

Reis’s neoclassical, pagan agenda resounds with propaganda. Reis’s paganism is

more than a style, for the reader is quickly and consistently inundated by a body of works

saturated with a desperate attempt to revive the religion(s) of antiquity, and to convince

the world that the pagan gods western civilization has resigned to “mythology” are

instead its reality. Reis’s attempts at reviving the lifestyle engendered by the religions of

6 In the letter to Casais Monteiro, Pessoa describes Caeiro’s conception as occurring “numa espécie de êxtase cuja natureza não conseguirei definir” (Monteiro 232) [in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I can’t define] (Sadlier 76).

44

the past are a blatant critique of his and Pessoa’s own historical social reality.

Throughout his poetry and prose Reis frequently addresses the limitations of Christianity

and how Christian thought has polluted the classical, pure way of living.

O Deus Pã não morreu,

Cada campo que mostra

Aos sorrisos de Apolo

Os peitos nus de Ceres—

Cedo ou tarde vereis

Por lá aparecer

O deus Pã, o immortal.

Não matou outros deuses

O triste deus cristão.

Cristo é um deus a mias,

Talvez um que faltava.

Pã continua a dar

Os sons da sua flauta

Aos ouvidos de Ceres

Recumbente nos campos.

Os deuses são os mesmos,

Sempre claros e calmos,

Cheios de eternidade

45

E desprezo por nós,

Trazendo o dia e a noite

E as colheitas douradas

Sem ser para nos nos dar

O dia e a noite e o trigo

Mas por outro e divino

Propósito casual. (OP [313])

[Pan the God did not expire,

Every field that

To Apollo sends a smile

Through naked breast of Ceres—

Soon or late shall see

A visit make thereto

The god, immortal Pan.

The melancholy Christian god

Killed not the other gods.

Christ is just one more,

Perhaps the one that lacked.

Pan continues fluted notes to send

Unto the ears of Ceres

Lying recumbent in the fields.

46

The gods are still the same,

Clear and calm as always,

Full of immortality—

For us, full of contempt,

Bringing on the day and night—

Not for us—the day and night and grain—

But for some other godly

Accidental goal.] (C.Lund)

In opposition to Christian doctrines of altruism, Reis insists on stoicism and indifference

as the method for true appreciation of the fated life we are allotted. Reis’s prose is

similarly pessimistic about Christianity and about his historical actuality. In what was to

be a preface to Caeiro’s poetry, Reis writes,

O paganismo morreu. O cristianismo, que por decadência e degeneração

descende dele, substituindo-[o] definitivamente. Está envenenada para

sempre a alma humana. Não há recurso ou apelo senão para a indiferença

ou para o desdém, se valesse a pena o esforço doloroso de sinceremente

desdenhar. (Obras em Prosa 113)

[Paganism died. Christianity, which through decadence and degeneration,

descended from it, definitively substituted [it]. The human soul is

permanently poisoned. There is no other recourse except to indifference

or disdain, if it is even worth the painful effort to scorn sincerely.]

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Also:

Ao pagão moderno, exilado e casual no meio de uma civilização inimiga,

só pode convir uma das formas últimas da especulação pagã—ou o

estoicismo, ou o epicurism. […] Por mim, se em mim posso falar, quero

ser ao mesmo tempo epicurista e estóico, certo que estou da inutilidade de

toda a ação num mundo onde o modo de pensar se esqueceu. (Obras em

Prosa 114)

[For modern pagans, as exiles in the midst of an enemy civilization, the

only feasible course is to embrace one of the last two schools of pagan

thought: Stoicism or Epicureanism…I (if I may speak of myself) have

chosen to be both an Epicurean and a Stoic, convinced as I am of the

uselessness of every action in a world where action has gone awry, and of

every thought in a world that has forgotten how to think.] (Selected Prose

153)

Indifference is often a dramatic theme of Reis’s odes:

Ouvi contar que outrora, quando a Pérsia

Tinha não sei qual guerra,

Quando a invasão ardia na Cidade

E as mulheres gritavam,

Dois jogadores de xadrez jogavam

O seu jogo continuo.

[…]

48

Imitemos os persas desta história,

E, enquanto lá fora,

Ou perto ou longe, a guerra e a patria e a vida

Chamam por nós, deixemos

Que em vão nos chamem, cada um de nós

Sob as sombras amigas

Sonhando, ele os parceiros, e o xadrez

A sua indiferença. (OP [337])

[I heard it told that once when Persia

Had I don’t know which war,

Houses were burning, walls

And archways being sacked,

Women raped and propped

Against the fallen walls,

Children pierced with lances,

Lying bloody in the streets…

But where they sat, near the City,

And far from all the tumult,

The chess players were playing

Their game of chess.

[…]

Let us be like the Persians in this tale,

49

And if somewhere out there,

Nearby or far away, we’re summoned

By war, by country, by life,

Let them summon in vain, and let

Each, under some friendly shade,

Dream of his opponent,

And the chess game, of its indifference.] (Poems 111, 113)

Far more important than the social commentary presented in the odes of Ricard Reis,

however, the language and syntax are what truly make up Reis’s remarkable poetic

identity. By stretching Portuguese to its linguistic limits Pessoa achieves a Latinate

beauty that rivals Horace himself. Fate, the Roman gods, and advocacy of moderation

and simple living serve as background to the soothing power of ingenious poetry. An ode

to Reis’s master, Caeiro:

Mestre, são plácidas

Todas as horas

Que nós perdemos,

Se no perdê-las,

Qual numa jarra,

Nós pomos flores.

Não há tristezas

New alegrias

Na nossa vida.

50

Assim saibamos,

Sábios incautos,

Não a viver,

Mas decorrê-la,

Tranqüilos, plácidos,

Tendo as crianças

Por nossas mestras,

E os olhos cheios

De Natureza…

[…]

Colhamos flores.

Molhemos leves

As nossas mãos

Nos rios calmos,

Para aprendermos

Calma também.

Girassóis sempre

Fitando o sol,

Da vida iremos

Tranqüilos, tendo

Nem o remorse

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De ter vivido. (OP [310])

[Master, placid are

All the hours

We lose,

If, in losing them,

We place them

Like flowers

In a vase.

There are neither sorrows

Nor joys

In our lives.

So let us,

Wisely innocent,

Learn not to live,

But to abide our course,

Tranquil, placid,

With children

For our tutors,

And our eyes filled

With nature…

52

(…)

But flowers let us pick

May we gently

Wet our hands

In rivers calm,

And learn the

Calm as well.

Sunflowers we,

With focus on the sun,

From life shall pass

Serene,

Without remorse

For having lived.] (C.Lund)

Reis’s neoclassical poetic style and his treatment of classical themes keep him grounded

in Pessoa’s historical reality. His appeals to moderation, finding pleasure in simplicity

and peace in nature, and the passivity of existence as it yields to the higher powers of the

gods and Fates are features reminiscent of eighteenth-century arcadismo, or Portuguese

neoclassicism, exemplified in the poetry of Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Manuel Maria

Barbosa du Bocage (Sadlier 92). More explicitly Pessoa uses Ricard Reis to engage his

contemporaries in an artistic game of literary intellectualism. The following is what

Fernando Pessoa wrote concerning Reis’s “birth,” found on a fragment dated 1914:

53

O Dr. Ricardo Reis nasceu dentro da minha alma no dia 29 de Janeiro de

1914, pelas 11 horas da noite. Eu estivera ouvindo no dia anterior uma

discussão extensa sobre os excessos, especialmente de realização, da arte

moderna. Segundo o meu processo de sentir as cousas sem as sentir, fui-

me deixando ir na onda dessa reação momentânea. Quando reparei em

que estava pensando, vi que tinha erguido uma teoria neoclássica, e que a

ia desenvolvendo. Anchei-a bela e calculei interessante se a

desenvolvesse segundo princípios que não adoto nem aceito. Ocorreu-me

a idéia de a tornar um neoclassicismo “científico” […] reagir contra duas

correntes—tanto contra o romanticismo moderno, como contra o

neoclassicismo à Maurras. (Obras em Prosa 139)

[Dr. Ricardo Reis was born in my soul on the 29th of January in 1914,

around eleven o’clock at night. The day before, I had been listening to an

extensive discussion on the excesses, especially in the formation, of

modern art. In keeping with my process of feeling things without being

aware of feeling them, I allowed myself to ride the wave of this

momentary reaction. When I noticed what I was thinking about, I saw that

I had constructed a neoclassic theory and was continuing to develop it. I

found it beautiful and thought it interesting if I developed it according to

principles that I myself neither adopt nor accept. The idea occurred to me

to make it a “scientific” neoclassicism…reacting against two currents—as

54

much against modern romanticism as against neoclassicism in the manner

of Maurras.] (Sadlier 90)

From his inception, the purpose Reis and his majestic odes were to serve was a poetic and

philosophical balance between the more extreme modernist literary trends of the time

exemplified in the “revolutionary classicism” of Charles Maurras and the fiery modern

“romanticism” of Marinetti. Ricardo Reis’s neoclassical odes are void of the polemics

characteristic of Maurras and similarly bereft of any hint of the emotion of romanticism,

and thus a successful exercise for Pessoa in controlling irony for creation.

Álvaro de Campos

Álvaro de Campos was conceived in much the same way as Ricardo Reis. Like

Reis, who was invented as a disciple for Alberto Caeiro, Campos was similarly created to

be Caeiro’s student but in direct opposition to Ricardo Reis. In fact, Álvaro de Campos

and his poem Ode Triumphal appeared to/in Pessoa simultaneously. According to

Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira on October 15, 1890 and chose for his profession

naval engineering. Although he studied in Glasgow, at the time of Pessoa’s letter to

Casais Monteiro, Campos was in Lisbon in “inactividade.” Endowed with stature, “(1m ,

75 de altura—mais 2 cm do que eu [Pessoa])” Campos had coloring “typical of a

Portuguese Jew,” wore his straight hair parted to the side, and used a monocle (233).

Campos is often considered a Futurist, and Pessoa himself designated Campos as a

“Sensacionista.” The emotion and energy characteristic of Campos contrasts vividly with

the simple control of Caeiro and the calm indifference of Reis. Despite overt and highly

constructed differences between the heteronyms, one characteristic they all share, in

55

varying qualities and quantities, is the tendency toward negation. More than a tendency,

each of the major heteronyms negates in order to affirm, much like Socrates’s declaration

of ignorance after having been divinely selected as the wisest of men. Even more like

Socrates, through the distanced, negative voices of his “others,” Pessoa is able to assert

his own genius. Much more than the other heteronyms, the irony surrounding Álvaro de

Campos is based in the negation-affirmation dialectic.

Søren Kierkegaard’s ironic reading of Socrates and Socratic irony provides a

model for Pessoa’s establishment of Campos’ subjectivity through negation. An aspect

of Socratic irony is revealed in Socrates’s deceptively simple assertion to the Sophists

and to his pupils that he knew nothing. Of course, in claiming he knew nothing Socrates

set out to demonstrate to the self-proclaimed wise just how little they actually knew. As

stated above, according to Kierkegaard, Socrates, through his irony and because he “had

the idea as boundary,” was wholly negative. He implied the opposite of what he knew to

be true only to reveal to others that the truth was in the opposite of what they believed.

Kierkegaard writes, “In oratory, for example, there frequently appears a figure of speech

with the name of irony and the characteristic of saying the opposite of what is meant.

Already here we have a quality that permeates all irony—namely, that the phenomenon is

not the essence but the opposite of the essence” (CI 247). He continues a few sentences

later, “If I next consider the speaking subject, I once again have a qualification that

permeates all irony—namely, the subject is negatively free” (CI 247). Socrates as subject

remained negatively free because he was not the new principle, but merely the potential

for that new principle which is subjectivity and ideality (CI 297). Although not the

principle itself, Socrates performed his obstetrical duties by delivering to others the

56

means to acquire wisdom not through the mandates, dictates, and statutes of the

collective state, but by thinking on their own, a process of “inwardness, which reflects

upon itself and in its relation to itself detaches and volatizes the established [Bestaaende]

in the flood of thought that surges over it and carries it away while it itself recedes again

into thought” (CI 163). By having the idea as boundary, Socrates remained negatively

free through irony meanwhile ushering in the subjectivity that set his pupils free from the

constraints of Athenian collective thinking.

In the spirit of Socrates who only knew that he knew nothing, the following are

the opening lines of Álvaro de Campos’ Tabacaria [Tabacco Shop] (OP [456]).

Não sou nada.

Nunca serei nada.

Não posso querer ser nada.

Á parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.

[I am nothing.

I shall never be anything.

I cannot even wish to be anything.

Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams in the world.] (Sixty 115)

Instead of proclaiming his ignorance, as does Socrates, Campos negates his very

existence past, present, and future. However, by the fourth line Campos already reveals

that the “phenomenon is actually the opposite of the essence.” He is nothing, yet he is

full of all of the dreams of the world. Like Socrates whose positivity is inherent in his

knowing at least what knowledge is but is similarly, according to Kierkegaard, a

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positivity never brought to actuality (CI 170), Campos too contains the potential for a

positivity he is unable to live. Later in the poem Campos qualifies his potential.

Tenho sonhado mais que o que Napoleão fez.

Tenho apertado ao peito hipotético mais humanidades do que Cristo.

Tenho feito filosofias em segredo que nenhum Kant escreveu.

Mas sou, e talvez serei sempre, o da mansarda,

Ainda que não more nela;

Serei sempre o que não nasceu para isso;

Serei sempre só o que tinha qualidades;

[I have dreamed more than Napoleon ever achieved.

I have clasped to a hypothetical breast more humanity than Christ did,

I have secretly thought out philosophies that no Kant has written down.

But I am and perhaps I will always be the one in the attic,

Even if I do not live in it;

I will always be the one who was not born for it;

I will always be only the one who had possibilities;] (Sixty 119)

Campos not only compares himself to Napoleon, Kant, and Christ, but he claims to

surpass them in their spheres. He is able to make such audacious assertions because

through irony he is negatively free. By establishing early that he considers himself

nothing, and that he will always be nothing, he is trying to convey in extreme and bold

terms that he is the opposite of the essence. The oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest

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man, and he proved his wisdom by declaring his ignorance. Campos asserts his greatness

similarly, by negating the worth of his existence.

Another example can be found in “Cruz na porta da tabacaria,” [I passed by the

door of the tobacco shop] (OP [479). In this poem Campos laments the death of Alves,

the owner of the tobacco shop. The result of the death of this man is that, “[d]esde ontem

a cidade mudou” [since yesterday the city has changed]. However, the last few lines of

the poem reveal that Campos is not writing about Alves the tobacco shop owner, but

about himself since he is more preoccupied with the fact that the city will not change at

all when he is gone: “Ele era fixo, eu, o que vou, / Se morrer, não falto, e ninguém diria: /

Desde ontem a cidada mudou.” [He was fixed, yet I, who fly, / If I die, I cause no lack,

and no one will say: / Since yesterday the city is changed.] Again, it is the “opposite of

the essence” that is truly at stake here, and by asserting a quiet disappearance from the

world of mortality for his Campos, Pessoa is assuring and reassuring his own certainty of

poetical immortality.

Just as the subjectivity Socrates brought to life in others stemmed from inward

reflection, similarly Campos relishes in self-analysis and self-separation from the world

of collective thinking. These reflections are presented with the same negative masking

that characterizes Campos’ self-definition. He says, “Quando olho para mim não me

percebo” (OP [437]). [When I look at myself I don’t perceive me.] And:

Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo.

Sou o intervalo entre o que desejo ser e os outros me fizeram,

Ou metade desse intervalo, porque também há vida…

Sou isso, enfim…

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Apague a luz, feche a porta e deixe de ter barulhos de chinelos no

corredor.

Fique eu no quarto só com o grande sossego de mim mesmo.

É um universo barato. (OP [529])

[I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.

I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me.

Or half that space, because there’s life there too…

So that’s what I finally am…

Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your slippers out there in

The hall.

Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

It’s a cheap world.] (Poems 100)

Campos is ultimately unable to realize the positive potential he is certain he

possesses and his poetry and prose are rich with the angst of frustration. Locked within

his own irony and the controlling irony of his creator, Campos’s destiny is not to

establish his own subjectivity but to bring it out of others, namely Fernando Pessoa.

Kierkegaard writes, “The negative has, namely, a double function—it infinitizes the finite

and finitizes the infinite”(CI 310), and Fernando Pessoa does just that with Álvaro de

Campos. He infinitizes himself through Campos’s finitizing of the unreachable, uttering

of the unutterable, and replacing of the “essence of the phenomenon” with its opposite.

In conclusion, one final appeal to Heidegger:

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But when the gods are named originally and the essence of things receives

a name, so that things for the first time shine out, human existence is

brought into a firm relation and given a basis. The speech of the poet is

establishment not only in the sense of the free act of giving, but at the

same time in the sense of the firm basing of human existence in its

foundation. (Heidegger 762)

Pessoa poetically constituted his literary personalities first through the words he

attributed to them then through words he composed about them. His irony and his speech

have given the heteronyms a remarkable foundation of human existence.

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One might possibly call [Socrates] a seducer, for he deceived the youth and awakened

longings which he never satisfied, allowed them to become inflamed by the subtle

pleasures of anticipation yet never gave them solid and nourishing food. He deceived

them all in the same way as he deceived Alcibiades, who, as previously mentioned,

observes that instead of the lover, Socrates becomes the beloved. S. Kierkegaard

Does writing in pleasure guarantee—guarantee me, the writer—my reader’s pleasure?

Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is.

A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is

this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets

are not placed, there can still be a game. Roland Barthes

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Chapter Two

Eros: The Embodiment of Irony

Whereas Socratic irony, in Kierkegaard’s “view,” dominates as the defining

characteristic of the Greek philosopher in The Concept of Irony, Socratic eros as well

holds certain significance for Kierkegaard in understanding Socrates’s unique role in

world history. Already seeds of an identification of irony with eros have been sown in

the notion of Socrates, and by my extension, Pessoa, as midwives of a modern

subjectivity. Even the notion of “mastering” or “controlling” irony has erotic

connotations especially since the “phenomenon,” in this case the “concept” of irony, is

designated by Kierkegaard himself in the opening paragraph of his dissertation as

“always foeminini generis [of the feminine gender]” (9). Although Kierkegaard reminds

his readers that Socrates as eroticist should not be restricted to only a sensual

interpretation, recent studies have investigated the references in Kierkegaard’s

dissertation that portray the ironist as eroticist. Such a distinction allows for a

simultaneous and interchangeable exploration of the theories and uses of irony and eros.

I am thinking specifically of John Vignaux Smyth’s A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne,

Kierkegaard, and Barthes in which the erotic perspective serves to clarify various

rhetorical and conceptual aspects of the ironic writings of his three chosen authors.

Sylvia Walsh also takes up the same topic by way of a brief but concise article

developing the necessary identification of Socratic eros with Socratic irony in

Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Both have been instrumental in staging an application of

Socratic-ironic-eros to an application of Fernando Pessoa’s works.

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Both Smyth and Walsh’s approaches to Socratic eros in The Concept of Irony are

similar in that they follow Kierkegaard’s analysis of the three views of Socrates and show

how respectively Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes portray Socrates as ironist and as

eroticist. I will take an inverse approach to Fernando Pessoa since instead of three

people’s perspectives of one man I am dealing with one man’s multiple perspectives on

his multiple selves. Aristophanes views Socratic eros-irony in a comic light as a

personality representative of an ideal (Walsh 132) and might, as Smyth speculates, serve

as a critique of “an eros that is neither conjugal and procreative nor even properly

cognizant of the social or political ‘woman issue’ as such, and that therefore deserves the

fate of being confused with the utterly sexless” (205). Xenophon in whom Kierkegaard

says “there is not one trace of irony” (CI 25), is unable to see Socrates as anything but a

pederast who brags about the love potions he uses to draw young men to him. Such a

view, Kierkegaard observes, makes readers “just as disgusted with him as with an aged

coquette who still believes herself capable of captivating—indeed, we are even more

disgusted, because we cannot perceive the possibility of Socrates’ ever having been

capable of it” (CI 24). Xenophon comes close to describing the “real” Socrates, however,

in that Socrates’s relation to eros is a negative one (Smyth 208). In contrast to

Xenophon’s sensual portrayal of Socrates, Plato’s works, divided into the early

dialectical and the later “mythical” dialogues, reveal an “intellectual” eroticism. Walsh

says Plato’s perception of Socratic midwifery is love in the form of “spiritual pederasty”

by which “young men are awakened to spiritual development through their relationships

with Socrates” (127). Kierkegaard separates the Platonic dialogues as mentioned above

into categories of the dialectical, identified with the ironic, and the mythical or

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speculative, having the idea in its fullness (CI 46-47). The dialectical Socratic method,

Kierkegaard explains, by moving from the concrete into abstraction provides for a

negative and abstract definition of love based on desire for that which one is wanting (CI

45). For Kierkegaard, a negative abstract definition is no definition at all because it is

empty. To define love as a desire to possess what one does not have is therefore to give it

an ironic definition; in Walsh’s words, “erotic love is defined here as ironic love, the

opposite of what love is in its fullness or positive definition” (128).

The Symposium and Phaedo are of particular interest to the notion of Socratic

irony as eros in which life is viewed respectively as erotic longing and a longing for

death, two views that are reconciled, according to Kierkegaard, by irony (Smyth 194).

Also, in these, the later, mythical dialogues, which Kierkegaard argues do not belong to

Socrates but to Plato in his recreation of Socrates (CI 104), prevails and tends to a more

positive definition of love as evidenced specifically in Diotima’s speech which “seeks ‘to

maintain something that actually is not’ [CI 106] in the form of an ideal reality concocted

by the imagination” (Walsh 131). Socrates, however, in the negativity of his irony and

his dialectical method, carries the abstract inversion into his personal life particularly in

relation to his disciples, in whom he inspires an intellectual longing that is not completely

free from sensuality. Alcibiades’s speech exemplifies such a relationship since he is able

to grasp the idea “with immediate certainty” due to his intoxicated state, for in coming

into contact with Socrates, Alcibiades finds that Socrates becomes the beloved instead of

the lover, and one who repeatedly rejects the advances of his admirer (CI 47,49).

Kierkegaard explains that Socrates become the beloved because he was irony, and that

his pederasty in relation to his pupils is a metaphor for an intellectual love of possibility,

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for “in his enthusiasm the ironist never accomplishes anything, for he never goes beyond

the category of possibility” (CI 192). Thus just as Socrates in constituting negatively free

irony is not subjectivity but merely the “idea as boundary” or the possibility of

subjectivity, so is his negative ironic love only a possibility of love (Walsh 136). Walsh

further extrapolates that Kierkegaard calls for a mastering of irony that must extend from

poetics to the personal realm in which erotic longing will give place to the healthy love

that results from acknowledging and embracing one’s actuality (136). Socrates was

unable to control irony enough to make it the “serving spirit” in his personal life because

“[f]or him, the whole given actuality had entirely lost its validity; he had become alien to

the actuality of the whole substantial world” (CI 264). “Too personally isolated” and

“too loosely joined” in his relations, Socrates’s inability to develop profound and

fulfilling relationships with others was a product of his place and role in world history

(CI 182). Consequently, Walsh argues, “[f]ar from embracing Socratic irony and eros,

then, as some interpreters would have it, the concluding irony of The Concept of Irony is

the negation of both in their unmitigated negativity toward actuality and complete self-

isolation from others” (136).

By way of introducing an “amorist interpretation” of Pessoan irony-eros and at

the risk of completely contradicting what I sought to demonstrate in the previous chapter

as evidence of Pessoa’s ability to control irony by grounding his heteronyms in his own

literary actuality, here I hope to show the limitations, by Kierkegaardian standards, such

an ironic existence held for Pessoa who, like Socrates, was unable to extend his control of

irony to his personal life. The evidence for such a claim is provided in a series of love

letters exchanged between Fernando Pessoa and Ophélia Queiroz, once an employee at

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the same firm as Pessoa’s cousin whom Pessoa often helped with commercial translations

(Cartas de Amor 18). Although excerpts from some of the letters were published by

Carlos Queiroz in an issue of Presença following the poet’s death and dedicated

especially to his memory, their integral publication was resisted for some years by the

said Queiroz’s maternal aunt, Ophélia, to whom the letters were written. Finally in 1990,

for reasons still undisclosed, Ophélia Queiroz agreed to provide for the public what editor

David Mourão-Ferreira claims is of “primeiríssima importância” (10).

The love affair, if it even can be called so, was fraught with frustration and

characterized by a tense distance Pessoa seemed unable to traverse. The affair lasted less

than one year, from the beginning of March 1920 through the end of November, and was

revived nine years later in September of 1929 only to end again in January of the next

year. They worked in the same office for little over a month, after which Pessoa would

meet Ophélia after work at her subsequent places of employment and accompany her

home, never entering her parents’ home because he thought it “vulgar,” and because he

wanted no one to know of their involvement. Many times Pessoa would tell Ophélia,

“Não digas a ninguém que nos ‘namoramos’, é ridículo. Amamo-nos” (Cartas de Amor

32; ; hereafter cited as Amor) [Don’t tell anyone that we are ‘dating,’ it’s ridiculous. We

love each other]. Little of the time they spent together was time spent alone, especially

when they began seeing each other again in 1929. Ophélia was living in the home of the

family of her nephew, the poet Carlos Queiroz, and Pessoa’s visits always involved the

three of them and were characterized by talk of poetry, books, and friends from literary

circles (Amor 42).

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Their involvement, however, was not devoid of passion or at least the occasional

passionate moment. Once, when the power went out in the office, Pessoa placed a note

next to the candle he delivered to Ophélia’s desk asking her to stay a few minutes after

everyone left. Suspecting Pessoa’s interest in her and because she was interested herself,

she stayed. When he came into her office Pessoa immediately began to declare his love

for her, like Hamlet, she says, declared himself to Ophelia, saying, “Oh, querida Ofélia!

Meço mal os meus versos; careço de arte para medir os meus suspiros; mas amo-te em

extremo. Oh! Até do ultimo extremo, acredita! (Amor 23). [Oh my dear Ofélia! I

measure my verses; I lack the art for measuring my sighs; but I love you extremely. Oh!

To the greatest extreme, believe me!] As she turned to leave, Pessoa grabbed her and

kissed her passionately. Another time, but in public, Pessoa stopped her as they were

walking and enveloped her in a passionate kiss. If their physical intimacy progressed

past these sporadic moments of passion, Ophélia does not say. In Richard Zenith’s

words, “[I]t is probable, though not provable, that he [Pessoa] died a virgin” (Zenith xiv).

Maintaining the secrecy of their involvement became a kind of game that often caused

Pessoa and Ophélia occasion to laugh at themselves.

Whether or not the Pessoa that paid amorous attention to Ophélia was simply

another of his dramatic personae trying to experience a different facet of existence,

Ophélia was certainly convinced of his sincerity. She writes, “Estava realmente muito

apaixonado por mim, posso dizê-lo, e tinha uma necessidade enorme da minha

companhia, da minha presença. Dizia-me numa carta: ‘…Não imaginas as saudades que

de ti sinto nestas ocasiões de doença, de abatimento e de tristeza…’” (Amor 36). [He was

truly very much in love with me, I can say, and he depended enormously on my

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company, my presence. He said once to me in a letter: “You cannot imagine the longing

that I feel for you during these occasions of sickness, of depression and of sadness.”] The

content of Pessoa’s letters and the nature of the relationship, however, reveal a strained

separation that Pessoa was either intentionally or unintentionally maintaining. His first

letter, a response to Ophélia’s own letter inquiring as to his feelings for her, opens in an

accusatory tone:

Para me mostrar o seu desprezo, ou, pelo menos, a sua indifferença real, não era

preciso o disfarce transparente de um discurso tão cumpido, nem da serie de “razões” tão

pouco sinceras como convincentes, que me escreveu. Bastava dizer-m’o. Assim,

entendo da mesma maneira, mas doe-me mais. [...] Quem ama verdadeiramente não

escreve cartas que parecem requerimentos de advogado. (Amor 49)

[To show me your dislike, or at least, your real indifference, the

transparent disguise of such an elaborate discourse was unnecessary, as

were the series of “reasons,” as insincere as they were unconvincing, that

you wrote me. All you had to do was tell me. This way I understand in

the same way but it hurts me more. […] One who loves truly does not

write letters that resemble requirements listed by an attorney.]

The subsequent letters express more tenderness, but there is still evidence of

barriers, emotional and psychological, between the two lovers. For example, Ophélia

remarks that sometimes Pessoa acted “confusedly,” especially, she says, when he

presented himself as Álvaro de Campos. On these occasions he would act “de uma

maneira totalmente diferente. Destrambelhado, dizendo coisas sem nexo” (Amor 38) [in

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a completely different manner. High strung, speaking incoherently]. Once Pessoa as

Campos said, according to Ophélia, “Trago uma incumbência, minha Senhora, é a de

deitar a fisionomia abjecta desse Fernando Pessoa, de cabeça para baixo num balde cheio

de água.” [I carry an incumbency, madame, which is to lay aside the abject physiognomy

of this Fernando Pessoa and place it face down in a bucket full of water.] When Ophélia

responded, “—Detesto esse Álvaro de Campos. Só gosto do Fernando Pessoa,” [I hate

this Álvaro de Campos. I like only Fernando Pessoa], Pessoa retorted, “Não sei porque”

(Amor 38). [I don’t know why.]

Often Pessoa would confide that he could not believe Ophélia could sincerely care

for someone like him. He wrote once in a letter, “Se não podes gostar de mim a valer,

finge, mas finge tão bem que eu não perceba” (38). [If you are unable to like me for who

I am, pretend, but do it so well that I don’t notice you’re pretending.] Still later, when the

romance was rekindled in 1929, Pessoa was different, physically as well as in his manner

of being (Amor 41-42). Ophélia writes of him, “Sempre nervoso, vivia obceçado com a

sua obra. Muitas vezes me dizia que tinha medo de não me fazer feliz, devido ao tempo

que tinha de dedicar a essa obra” (Amor 42). [Always nervous, he lived obsessed with

his work. Many times he would tell me that he was afraid of not being able to make me

happy because of all the time he had to dedicate to this work.] Whether because of his

own insecurities or his “obsessive” dedication to his work, Pessoa maintained a tense

distance with his lover, unable to fulfill the desires that resulted and were raised exactly

because of that distance. Although Ophélia later married, Pessoa died a bachelor,

providing an appropriate closure to such an open-ended relationship.1

1 Coincidentally generic parallels can be drawn with Pessoa’s love affair and that of Søren Kiekegaard with Regine Olsen.

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Pessoa’s fear that he was unable to show “adequate” love for Ophélia because of

the time he dedicated to his work brings up an interesting economy present in the

relationship between “work” and “play,” an “erotic economy” developed as such at

length by John Vignaux Smyth. The economic aspect of the relationship is inherent in

the seeming diametric opposition between work and play and in their necessary

symbiosis.

If the aim of play is posited as pleasure, for example, and the aim of work

as “power” (or any aim not pleasurable in itself), then the unity of work

and play is characteristically achieved by portraying work as a deferral or

investment of pleasure, which nevertheless has pleasure as its ultimate

object. Play, on the other hand, can correspondingly be conceived after

the manner of games of skill and competition, as a less consequential

variety of work that nevertheless requires effort if the maximum sum of

pleasure is to be reaped. (171)

Because Socratic irony is neither work nor play but rather betrays a “higher madness”

that presupposes their union, Smyth calls the “resulting predicament” workplay. He

qualifies his neologism, “Workplay is thus intended first and foremost to describe the

realm of human action that falls outside—or at any rate, at the very limit—of the

opposition between work and play, but which is nevertheless affected by volitional acts”

(176). The overcoming of work and play in workplay, Smyth argues, appeals either to

“the irony of the Divine Will” or affords a “relapse into the nonvolitional process of

nature,” and thus the two themes of eros and death, which relate uniquely to both the

divine and the natural, supply the space wherein “working determination and playful

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indetermination are most inseparably conjoined” (176-77). Smyth later extends this

economy to include the writings of Roland Barthes, especially as they relate to irony and

the exchange that takes place between a reader and a text. As stated above, according to

Kierkegaard, irony unites erotic longing and the longing for death, the two themes both

divine and natural that give place to workplay, and it is in fact eros that consequently

provides irony with the corporality necessary to sustain itself in actuality. Thus in the

erotic economy between reader and text, irony-eros opens the space wherein workplay

occurs between the reader whose desire is to understand the game, and the author who

simultaneously desires to conceal and reveal that same game, for “[t]he ironic figure of

speech has…a certain superiority deriving from its not wanting to be understood

immediately, even though it wants to be understood” (CI 248). Consistent with the

Socratic-ironic-negative definition of love, Kierkegaard acknowledges that “irony is the

negation of love; it is love’s incitement” (CI 51). In extending his irony to the overall

heteronymic project, Fernando Pessoa, through the necessary erotic element, provides

places for workplay and physical aspects for his fictional friends.

Erotic love in Pessoa’s poetic world is woven through his heteronymic

personalities with uncharacteristic consistency, revealing both intellectual and sensual,

divine and natural, dimensions. Akin to Socratic midwifery of the intellect, Pessoa

pictured himself as the harbinger of a new kind of love, love that is spiritual, intellectual

and beyond the corruption of carnal sensuality. Pessoa had planned to write a poem

entitled, “Anteros,” named for the younger brother of Eros. Whereas Anteros is generally

understood as representative of the avenger of unrequited love, according to Richard

Zenith, notes in Pessoa’s archive indicate that to Pessoa, contrary to the instinctive and

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sensually derived love of Eros, Anteros represented dispassionate, intellectual love of

transcending value. The transcendent, spiritual love of Anteros was to mark the advent of

the Fifth Empire in which Portugal would reign as culturally and artistically preeminent

(Selected Prose 160). The always coming Fifth Empire and its transcendent love recall

the “Messianic hope,” a concept further developed in recent years by Jacques Derrida.2 It

is the distance between the now and the future that maintains the hope of a Messiah, for,

as soon as the Messiah arrives and the hope is fulfilled, it is simultaneously annihilated.

Rather than an actual Fifth Empire or the actual arrival of an era of spiritual love, the

essence of the “empire” is embodied in the waiting, hoping, and desiring of its arrival.

From within the poems of the individual heteronyms, from the comments made from

without, and from the overall economy between author, Fernando Pessoa, and his reader,

irony is embodied in desire.

Alberto Caeiro, being the most “simple” of the heteronyms, has an equally simple

view of love and its nature. For him, in his normal state of mind, to think is to be sick.

However, in six short poems under the title O Pastor Amoroso, he is not in his normal

state of mind because he is in love. The object of Caeiro’s love remains unnamed, being

identified only as “ela,” and described only in a vague reference to her “figura.” Her

characteristics and attributes are similarly unarticulated, and all the reader knows about

“her” is how Caeiro’s love for her affects him. Consistent with the portrait Pessoa has

created of Caeiro from within and without, Caeiro’s love is markedly pure. He admits,

“E eu gosto tanto dela que eu não sei como a desejar” (OP [257]) [I like her so much that

I do not know how to desire her]. Caeiro’s love is presented in his poems through a self-

analysis and deeper self-understanding and is self-relegated to his thoughts and his 2 See Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida especially chapter 6.

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dreams where he can exercise more control over his feelings, as exemplified in “Passei

toda a noite, sem dormir, vendo, sem espaço, a figura dela” [I spent the whole night

without sleep, seeing, without space, her figure] (OP [259]), and the lines:

Tenho alegria e pena porque perco o que sonho

E posso estar na realidade onde está o que sonho.

[…] Quero que ele me diga qualquer cousa para eu acordar de novo. (OP

[260])

[I have joy and pain because I lose what I dream

And I can be in the reality that is what I dream

(…) I want her to tell me something, anything, so that I can wake up

again.]

Though Caeiro’s love may be pure from unleashed passion, it necessarily passes through

the scrutiny of the mind which Pessoa, on more than one heteronymic occasion, will

assert is exactly what secures the transcendental quality of “anteros,” the always

unattainable love.

Ricardo Reis presents the reader with the most intellectually structured

perspective of love of all the poetic heteronyms. As stated above, Reis imaginatively

embodies Pessoa’s game with contemporary literary trends and was particularly crafted

to contradict current romantic extravagances. Several of Reis’s poems are addressed to

certain women whose names such as Lídia, Neera, and Cloe help to indicate their roles as

muses or some other type of spiritual companion or guide and are stoically non-erotic.

Like Caeiro, there is a purity evident in Reis’s amorous language, but a purity more rigid

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and philosophical than Caeiro’s desire simply to “think” about his love. Reis emphasizes

the innocence of the love he both gives and receives, insisting that he and his partner are

mere children: “Nem fomos mais do que crianças” (OP [315]) [We were nothing more

than children]; or an ethereal “nothing:” “Hoje, Neera, não nos escondamos, / Nada nos

falta, porque nada somos” (OP [316]) [Today, Neera, let us not hide ourselves / We lack

nothing, because we are nothing]. Most prevalent, however, is the essence of Pessoa’s

transcendent, erotic telos evident in Reis’ search for a higher, more spiritual union that

rises above the desires of the body and goes beyond the momentary here and now, for

example in “Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio” (OP [315]) [Lydia, come and sit

with me, by the riverside] (Sixty 75). Controlled and intellectual, Reis prefers to sit with

his Lydia watching the river run by rather than trade kisses, embraces, and tender

touches. Ricardo Reis, along with his master Alberto Caeiro, presents a love as

emotionless, intellectual, and spiritual as possible. The view becomes clearer when we

can step back from the arena and recognize that the only union possible for Reis and

Caeiro is a spiritual or intellectual one that can only be consummated through the

momentary bliss of the reader.

Álvaro de Campos became the persona for Pessoa’s experimentation with

“sensationist” poetry, something Pessoa and his contemporaries3 of the Nova Renasença

movement proclaimed was a fusion of the psyche of the Renaissance, or reality centered

in the soul, with the psyche of romanticism, or reality centered in nature.4 Campos is

frequently identified with Walt Whitman because of his insatiable desire to experience

everything, and because of his homage “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (OP [443]). The

3 José Regio, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Alberto de Serpa, and Marques Matias are named specifically by Pessoa. 4 See “Uma réplic a ao senhor Dr.Coelho” in Obras de Prosa, 397.

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“sensationist” agenda as embodied in the works of Campos plays upon the more

pleasurable and sensual aspects of eros although even Campos, whether in a drug-

induced frenzy, under the spell of futuristic worship of mechanical movement, or in deep,

nostalgic reflexivity and self-analysis, maintains a certain intellectual control over his

emotions. In fact, he cannot escape the logic of his intellect.

Álvaro de Campos’s erotic episodes differ markedly in content from those of the

other heteronyms. Like Whitman’s, Campos’s writings are homoerotic, and the focus of

Campos’s desire is sensation. Although Caeiro and Reis intellectualize and philosophize

their desire while Campos “sensualizes” it, most certainly they all center their respective

subjectivities in what effects their never-to-be-fulfilled desires have on them, whether

they are increased vision, access to moment of eternity, or sensual ecstasy. Even Campos

exhibits a desire for intellectual or spiritual eroticism. In the following passage from

“Ode Triunfal,” Campos’s speaker reveals a rapturous relationship with an arsenal of

warfare technology.5 Rather, the rapture results from the potential power latent in the

destructive weapons.

Eh, cimento armado, beton de cimento, novos processos!

Progressos dos armamentos gloriosamente moríferos!

Couraças, canhões, metralhadoras, submarinos, aeroplanos!

Amo-vos a todos, a tudo, como uma fera.

Amo-vos carnivoramente,

Pervertidamente e enroscando a minha vista

5 Darlene Sadlier sites these same passages and others to point out where Campos and Whitman agree and where Campos deviates from Whitmanian content and style. See especially chapter 6.

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Em vós, ó coisas grandes, banais, úteis, inúteis,

Ó coisas todas modernas,

Ó minhas contemporâneas, forma actual e próxima

Do sistema imediato do Universo!

Nova Revelação metálica e dinâmica de Deus!

[Hey, reinforced concrete,6 cement mixer, new processes!

Progress of gloriously deadly armaments!

Armor-plate, cannons, machine guns, submarines, airplanes!

I love you, I love everything like a wild animal.

I love you carnivorously,

Pervertedly, coiling my sight

Around you, oh large, banal, useful and useless things,

Oh all modern things,

Oh my contemporaries, present and future form

Of the immediate system of the Universe!

New, metallic and dynamic Revelation of God!] (Sadlier 107)

Often Campos’ erotic images are masochistic and violent. In “Ode Marítima”

Campos embarks on a sea voyage in which he experiences, as Sadlier puts it, “a kind of

infinite wet dream” (107). The prospect of the voyage “seduces” him into an obsession;

the dock and the sea air “penetrate” him “physically.” The erotic images become more

explicit as the dream-voyage progresses and Campos encounters a group of pirates. 6 I have modified Sadlier’s translation of “cimento armado” as “armed ciment” to “reinforced concrete.”

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Beside the possible association between pirates, sodomy, and homoerotic fantasy, no

sooner has the poet met with the pirates then he lapses into a fantasy wherein he is

tortured and raped repeatedly by them.

Ó meus peludos e rudes heróis da aventura e do crime!

Minhas marítimas feras, maridos da minha imaginação!

Amantes casuais da obliquidade das minhas sensações!

Queria ser Aquela que vos esperasse nos portos,

A vós, odiados amados do seu sangue de pirata nos sonhos!

[…]

O bárbaros do antigo mar!

Rasgai-me e feri-me!

De leste a oeste de meu corpo

Riscai de sangue a minha carne!

[…]

Fazei de mim qualquer coisa como se eu fosse

Arrastado—ó prazer, ó beijada dor!—

Arrastado à cauda de cavalos chicoteados por vós…

Mas isto no mar, isto no ma-a-ar, isto no MA-A-A-AR!

Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh! Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh! EH-EH-EH-EH-

EH-EH-EH! No MA-A-A-A-AR!

[Oh, my rough and hairy heroes of adventure and crime!

My maritime beasts, husbands of my imagination!

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Casual lovers of the obliquity of my sensations!

I wanted to be She who waited for you on the docks,

For you, hateful lovers, with your pirate blood in dreams!

[…]

Oh barbarians of the ancient sea!

Rip me open, wound me!

Mark from east to west

The flesh of my body with blood!

[…]

Make of me anything as if I were

A wretch—oh pleasure, oh, kissed pain!—

Dragged by the tail of horses whipped by you…

But on the sea, on the sea, on the SE-A-A-A-A!

Ha-ha -ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! HA-HA-HA-HA-

HA-HA-HA! On the SE-A-A-A-A!] (Sadlier 109)

Masked in carnal sensuality and imagery, especially in the above passage, Campos is still

able to convey his desire for a higher, more ethereal union. The pirates of his dream are

described as “husbands of [his] imagination” and “casual lovers of the obliquity of [his]

sensations.” In “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (OP [443]), Campos describes the sensual

effect of thinking of the “concubina fogosa” [fiery concubine] and “grande pederasta”

[great pederast] as “[u]ma erecção abstracta e indirecta no fundo da minha alma” [(a)n

abstract and indirect erection in the depth of my soul] (Sadlier 110). Even in the midst of

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emotion and a celebration of sensation, Pessoa/Campos still promotes a metaphysical and

distant eros.

Characteristic of the symbolist or decadent agenda of “sensationist” poetry7 is the

desperate longing for that which is unattainable, and it is found throughout Campos’s

work. Melancholy and resigned, Campos often laments his inability to live as simply and

truly as others appear to live. In “Tabacaria” he writes:

(Come chocolates, pequena:

Come chocolates!

[…]

Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes!

Mas eu penso e, ao tirar o papel de prata, que é de fôlha de estanho,

Deito tudo para o chão, como tenho deitado a vida.) (OP [456])

[(Eat your chocolates, little girl;

Eat your chocolates!

[…]

I wish I could eat chocolates with the same truth with which you eat them!

But I think, and when I unwrap the silver paper which is just tinfoil,

I drop everything on the ground just as I have dropped life.)]

7 In a short critical piece entitled “Os Sensacionistas Portugueses,” Pessoa identifies sensationists as the descendents from the decadent and symbolist movements (Obras em Prosa 454).

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Trapped by his own wealth of knowledge he cannot return to simplicity or to the

innocence of youth,8 but it is this longing, this unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire that

sustains Campos, both as a poet and as a poetic creation.

Campos is not the only heteronym to explore the sensual, and homoerotic, side of

irony-eros. Two of Pessoa “ortónimo’s” English poems are explicitly erotic.

“Epithalamium” revels in the joys of heterosexual love whereas “Antinous” presents not

only an erotic space for workplay, but fuses death and eros, the two types of longing

unified by irony. The poem describes Emperor Hadrian’s fatal mourning for the death of

his beloved Antinous. As Hadrian studies the lifeless body of his young love Pessoa

writes of Hadrian’s longing for a love extinguished:

Even as he thinks, the lust that is no more

Than a memory of lust revives and takes

His senses by the hand, his felt flesh wakes,

And all becomes again what ‘twas before.

The dead body on the bed starts up and lives

And comes to lie with him, close, closer, and

A creeping love-wise and invisible hand

At every body-entrance to his lust

Whispers caresses which flit off yet just

Remain enough to bleed his last nerve’s strand,

O sweet and cruel Parthian fugitives! (OP [875])

The final lines of the poem see Hadrian’s longing for love turn to a longing for death.

His hurting breath was all his sense could know. 8 See, for example, “Aniversário” (OP [473]).

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Out of the falling darkness the wind rose

And fell; a voice swooned in the courts below;

And the Emperor slept.

Pessoa “ortónimo’s” Portuguese poems, especially those in Cancioneiro, reveal

the more intellectual side of desire and engage in the game of straining for the

unattainable. The approximately 150 poems that make up Cancioneiro are more

heterogeneous in style and theme as compared with the other heteronyms, but they often

are described generally as treating the interstices of poetry and philosophy. Poems

dealing with that which is “beyond God,” the interval between speech and speechlessness

(OP [58.5]), or a world that has neither ground nor covering clouds and winds, “Onde

nada se mostra haver or ser” (OP [50]) [Where nothing seems to have been or to be],

litter the pages of the collection Pessoa claims for himself. The first of the five poems of

“Além-Deus” [Beyond God], entitled “Abismo,” (OP [58.1]) is as follows:

Olho o Tejo, e de tal arte

Que me esquece olhar olhando,

E súbito isto me bate

De encontro ao devaneando—

O que é ser-rio, e correr?

O que é está-lo eu a ver?

Sinto de repente pouco,

Vácuo, o momento, o lugar,

Tudo de repente é oco—

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Mesmo o meu estar a pensar.

Tudo—eu e o mundo em redor—

Fica mais que exterior.

Perde tudo o ser, ficar,

E do pensar se me some.

Fico sem poder ligar

Ser, idéia, alma de nome

A mim, à terra e aos cues…

E súbito encontro Deus.

[I watch the Tagus in such a way

That my watching forgets I’m watching

And suddenly this strikes me

Against my daydreaming—

What is it, river-being flowing?

What is it, my-being-here and watching?

I feel almost nothing suddenly,

Time and place both emptied,

Everything gone hollow suddenly—

Even my being here and thinking.

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Everything—myself, the world around me—

Remains more than external.

In everything the being and remaining, lost,

And vanishing from my thinking.

I am powerless to link

Being, idea, soul, by name

To myself, the earth, the heavens…

And suddenly face God.] (Poems 136)

Not only do the poems of the Cancioneiro reveal an eternal longing for what is never to

be known, poems like “Natal” [Nativity] betray a clear understanding of the impossibility

of the task.

Nasce um deus. Outros morrem. A Verdade

Nem veio nem se foi: o Erro mudou.

Temos agora uma outra Eternidade,

E era sempre melhor o que passou.

Cega, a Ciência a inútil gleba lavra.

Louca, a Fé vive o sonho do seu culto.

Um novo deus é só uma palavra.

Não procures sem creias: tudo é oculto.

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[One God is born. Others die. Truth

Did not come or go. Error changed.

Eternity is different now.

What happened was better always.

Blind Science plows the useless sod.

Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.

A new God is but a word.

Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.] (Honig 142)

It is not surprising that the search for the “beyond,” the “unknown,” and the “hidden”

find explicit articulation in some of “Fernando Pessoa’s” poems, for that same search,

that same game, is what defines his entire multiple existence. Even Bernardo Soares, the

heteronymic author of what was to become O Livro do Desassossego, fills his “book”

with passages that argue the impossibility of one person ever fully possessing another in

physical union. Instead, Soares views two-dimensional lovers, those depicted in stained

glass or on Chinese tea cups, as superior, for their love, their desire, is never fulfilled but

is an eternal longing (Zenith xiv).

As with the other heteronyms, the distance of unfulfilled desire helps to maintain

the space necessary for ironic play, for it is a similar kind of desire that works on any

reader of Pessoa. Each poem flirts with the reader’s intellect while each heteronym

teases the reader’s willingness to believe. Meanwhile from without, Pessoa tries to

distract us with false biographies and critical commentary, committing to nothing but the

reality of his imagination. Between every author and his reader there is an exchange that

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takes place, and in agreement with Barthes, with Pessoa the exchange is charged with

desire, with eros. It is a confidence game and Pessoa is the confidence man, the ultimate

eiron, flirting and teasing with contradictory and yet equally earnest assertions. For the

game to function, the confidence man must be certain his true intentions remain

concealed. The seduction is subtle, and some will fall victim to his spell, as many have,

and find they are no longer suspending disbelief but have plunged head first into a

fictional, empty world with only fleeting glimpses of non-existent identities. When this

happens, Pessoa, like Socrates, instead of the lover becomes the beloved, because he lets

us “flare up in the thrilling joy of contact but never [gives us] strong and nourishing

food” (CI 188). Still fewer will recognize the economy at play and will submit to the

game while holding on to the trump card of actuality, the same card that Pessoa, from his

own actuality, waves over the heads of his heteronyms and the readers that fall in love

with them.

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87

[T]o spare himself the trouble of organizing and publishing the richest part of his prose,

Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can

never exist. What we have here isn’t a book but its subversion and negation: the

ingredients of a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its

weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and

no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What

we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one

man’s anguished soul. Richard Zenith

As a rule, imagination [Phantasien] is the medium for the process of infinitizing [det

Uendeliggjørendes Medium]; it is not a capacity, as are the others—if one wishes to

speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities]. When all is said

and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a person has depends upon what

imagination he has, upon how that person reflects himself—that is, upon imagination.

Imagination is infinitizing reflection [den uendeliggjørende Reflexion], and therefore the

elder Fichte quite correctly assumed that even in relation to knowledge the categories

derive from the imagination. The self is reflection, and the imagination is reflection, is

the rendition of the self as the self’s possibility. The imagination is the possibility of any

and all reflection, and the intensity of this medium is the possibility of the intensity of the

self. Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death

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Chapter Three

Imagined Reality and the Irony of Bernardo Soares’s

Livro do Dessassosego

In 1915, just one year after the birth of the poetic heteronyms, Pessoa began the

prose project that would occupy the rest of his life, a project that until his death in 1935

amounted to hundreds of literary and literal fragments found gathered haphazardly in a

large envelope designated to be part of the Livro do Desassossego. Although more than

half of what was to be included in the prose masterpiece was written in the last six years

of Pessoa’s life, the Livro passed through various stages of style and content ranging

from passages with new-symbolist and “sensationist” tones to analytical personal

confessions and finally to emotion-filled impressions. The Livro even changed authors

three times, attributed first to Fernando Pessoa then to Vicente Guedes and finally to

Bernardo Soares (Zenith xi,xx). Pessoa himself seemed unclear as to the direction in

which he wanted to take his book, and many of the fragments were marked ambiguously

as pertaining to the “L do D” and/or the works of “A de C,” meaning Álvaro de Campos.

Pessoa even labeled a copy of a letter written to his own mother with the “L do D” logo

(Zenith xv). Aside from all of the appealing circumstances surrounding the process of its

composition, the Livro do Desassossego itself, the book that never was and never can be,

exploits the poetic possibilities of Portuguese prose to offer a sublime mode of existence

in which one lives simultaneously within the reality of one’s imagination and that of

one’s actuality.

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Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa Bernardo Soares holds a special place in the heteronymic realm because he is not

a full-fledged heteronym with a personality distinct and separate from his creator. In the

letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro about the genesis and characteristics of the heteronyms,

Pessoa says of the final author of the Livro do Desassossego:

O meu semi-heterônmio Bernardo Soares, que aliás em muitas

coisas se parece com Álvaro de Campos, aparece sempre que estou

cansado ou sonolento, de sorte que tenha um pouco suspensas as

qualidades de raciocínio e inibição; aquela prosa é um constante devaneio.

É um semi-heterônimo porque, não sendo a personalidade a minha, é, não

diferente da minha, mas uma simples mutilação dela. Sou eu menos o

raciocínio e a afetividade. (235)

[My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who although in many

ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, appears always when I am tired or

sleepy so that his qualities of ratiocination and inhibition are somewhat

suspended; that prose is a constant dream. He is a semi-heteronym

because his personality, although not my own, does not differ from my

own but is a mere mutilation of it. It is me without rationality and

affectivity.]

In an earlier letter to João Gaspar Simões, Pessoa writes that Bernardo Soares was not a

heteronym but a literary persona (Cartas a João G.Simoes 91). From a “personalidade

literária” to a “semi-heterônimo,” Soares was one character whose fictionality Pessoa

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seemed determined to qualify. Pessoa is clearly complicating that fictionality, however,

by maintaining that Soares’s personality is not his own, and yet not different. Soares, a

“mutilation” of Pessoa, was not always the destined author of Pessoa’s fragments of

disquietude. In a 1913 publication of the literary journal A Águia, Pessoa makes

reference to a text called “Na Floresta do Alheamento” [In the Forest of Alienation]

which he claims was to be included in a larger work “em preparação,” meaning the Livro

do Desassossego. To this he signed his own name. Not two years later Pessoa had

already attributed the work to Vicente Guedes, another heteronym, and ultimately, nearly

a decade later, the Livro came under the authorship of Bernardo Soares (Neves 36). It is

intriguing that it mattered so much to Pessoa which name he signed to a text. 1 That over

time the Livro was moving in directions Pessoa perhaps felt were beyond or outside of

himself, and then that even one of his creations was unable to persist with the evolution

of the Livro indicates how constrained Pessoa himself was by his own creations and

creativity.

If shaped by the thoughts revealed in the Livro, Soares’s character at times seems

to have Caeiro-like instincts. There are traces of Reisian classicist and Epicurean beliefs

throughout. Not surprisingly, Soares muses about imaginary sea voyages, mentions

engineering, and complains of his creative impotence, his nothingness, much like Álvaro

de Campos. There are numerous instances wherein Soares writes of plurality and

otherness, that he is both and neither, which speaks to what we know of Pessoa the

creator. It is easy to be seduced by the fragments, only some of which are dated, all of

which were left unorganized and scattered about the treasure chest that held Pessoa’s

1 In light of modern literary criticism, it may be difficult to resist the impulse to declare that publishing the work under either or all names would be insignificant to its overall impact. What Pessoa’s “authorships” offer to the modern debate of the role of the author is worth exploring but outside the scope of this paper.

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writings, and it is easy to forget the elaborate frame of deferred authorship provided by

Pessoa and slip into a reverie of discovery that just might be an autobiographical window.

Fragments like “Cada um de nós é vários, é muitos, é uma prolixidade de si mesmos”

(Livro do Desassossego [20]; hereafter cited as LD) [Each of us is various, is many, a

prolixity of ourselves], “Dar a cada emoção uma personalidade, a cada estado de alma

uma alma” (LD [29]) [Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul],

and “[F]elizmente para a humanidade, cada homem é só quem é, sendo dado ao génio,

apenas, o ser mais alguns outros” (LD [56]) [Fortunately for humanity, each man is only

who he is. Only the genius is given the ability to be others as well]; these and similar

statements seem to reveal more of Pessoa than of his semi-heteronym, a distinction

Pessoa repeatedly complicates.

In 1991 Richard Zenith in cooperation with Carcanet published an English

translation of the largest compilation of fragments intended for the Livro that existed in

any language at the time. In his introduction, Zenith urges readers not to confuse Pessoa

with Soares nor Soares with Pessoa. Citing Pessoa’s own declaration that Soares was a

mutilation of himself, a literary personality that lacked his own “raciocínio” and

“afetividade,” Zenith’s argument is founded on the distancing external conditions. For

example, that Soares has no sense of humor marks a stark contrast with Pessoa since he,

Zenith states, was endowed with both personality and humor. Whereas Soares belittles

himself and his literary efforts, Zenith claims Pessoa never did. The other differences

refer to location and differing professions. Such superficial distinctions, however, are

dissatisfying. Zenith’s treatment of the internal aspects of the creator and his semi-

heteronym is equally unconvincing. He writes:

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As for their respective inner lives, Soares takes his progenitor’s for a

model: ‘I’ve created various personalities within. […] I’ve so externalized

myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the

living stage where various actors act out various plays’ (f.308). But we

have no evidence that these various actors really (or unreally, I should

say) existed in Bernardo Soares. We have only his word to go on. Pessoa,

as we know, gave literary substance to dozens of derivative personalities,

not least among them being the disquieted assistant bookkeeper.

(Centenary Pessoa 165)

Here the difference between the two authors of the Livro do Desassossego lies in the fact

that Pessoa did indeed produce a literary coterie of personalities whereas Soares only tells

the reader he has done so. If we believe all that Fernando Pessoa says about Bernardo

Soares, however, why would we not believe what Pessoa writes that Soares writes about

himself? Perhaps we do believe that Soares has created poets and dramatists that have

their own styles and works. Has he then risen to the level of and become equal to,

synonymous with, as Zenith states it, his progenitor? It appears Zenith became aware of

such incongruities since he modifies his argument in the introduction to his most recent

translation of the Livro published in 2001. Whereas Zenith still argues Soares’s inner life

is modeled after Pessoa’s and cites the same passage from the Livro, he presents a series

of questions and finally determines that Soares is describing Pessoa’s dramatic existence,

at least in the passage Zenith uses.

Coming from Soares, this [Soares’s confession of his own “multiplicity”]

is a strange declaration. Are we supposed to believe that the assistant

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bookkeeper, one of the actors who played on the stage of Pessoa’s life,

had his own troupe of heteronyms? If so, should we then suppose that

these subheteronyms had sub-subheteronyms? The notion of an endless

heteronymic lineage might have amused Pessoa, but the reason for his

alter egos was to explain and express himself, and perhaps provide a bit of

reflective company. Soares, in the passage cited, is describing Pessoa’s

own dramatic method of survival. (xii)

There is, however, at least one explanation for Pessoa’s unwillingness to separate Soares

entirely from, and conversely to identify Soares completely with, himself, and it is

consistent with Pessoa’s own method of indirect communication.

The juxtaposition of Pessoa’s actuality with his heteronym’s imagined reality, or

the conjunction of details of Fernando Pessoa’s actual biographical life with similar

details of the fictional Bernardo Soares’s imagined life, imagined through Fernando

Pessoa, reveals a locus for ironic play. As mentioned above, the similarities are striking

and seductive, and if the reader makes a small supposition here and creates a tiny tie

there, it is possible to see Soares’s mother’s passing away when he was only one year old

as Pessoa’s own father’s early death, Soares’s commercial bookkeeping as a reflection of

Pessoa’s commercial correspondence, and Soares’s office as Pessoa’s own. However

tempting it might be to draw parallels and then conclusions in order to understand the

work better and know the author(s) more fully, the distance inherent in the semblance of

verisimilitude must not be overlooked. There are certainly autobiographical elements

found throughout the text of the Livro do Desassossego, and they are based on Pessoa’s

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claim that Soares is not completely different from himself. These similarities are

precisely what maintain the distances opened by the irony that is Pessoa’s entire project.

Deception through verisimilitude is an ironic instantiation exploited by

Kierkegaard as well. In his discussion specifically of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Roger

Poole calls attention to the obvious parallels between the young man in the story and

Kierkegaard’s own life regarding his engagement to Regine Olsen, parallels Poole deems

“deliberately mendacious” (64). As over time scholars have missed the distance and

attempted to glean from Repetition any juicy details regarding Kierkegaard’s tragic love

affair, Poole argues they often have missed the irony of the text itself while trying to

identify it. Poole mentions Niels Thulstrup’s claim that amidst jumbled and deliberately

confusing statements about repetition he finds “genuine” repetition considered only twice

in Kierkegaard’s work. Here Thulstrup cites two direct instances when “repetition” is

explicitly exposed. Poole writes, “Thulstrup’s inability to read irony here becomes a

seriously disabling matter for his ability to read at all. The two cases are not repetitions

just because someone in the text says they are; the two cases are in any case examples of

opposites, not similarities” (73). In this instance, too literal of a reading might prove not

to be truly reading at all, and such is often the case when we believe everything Fernando

Pessoa, self admittedly prone to “artistic lying,” might say about his heteronyms and

what they say about themselves.

The end of Poole’s analysis of Repetition and the premise of his entire book is

that Kierkegaard’s indirect communication indicates the inability to assimilate certain

concepts into a system, as the Danish Hegelian scholars were so wont to do. He calls it

“moral luck” that news of Regine Olsen’s engagement sent Kierkegaard to the press to

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rip out ten or so pages from the end of the ready-to-be-published Repetition. In their

place Kierkegaard added, in Poole’s words, “some new, falsely veridical or truly

mendacious pages” that failed to save his work from ruin. Instead the last pages are “all

too personal” and therefore grossly out of place in the conceptual game initially

established. The result of this case of “moral luck,” says Poole, is that “the basic

category of repetition remains successfully undefined until the very last. Right to the

end, the reader is held in the ignominious position of not being allowed to choose. The

term repetition never ceases to oscillate in its valency for the whole length of the text.

Paul de Man could never have wished for a more perfect case of aporia. There is,

therefore, no Kierkegaardian doctrine of repetition” (82). At the risk of drawing

similarities where there might be more differences, and perhaps not daring to label it

“moral luck,” Pessoa’s inability to or insistence on an unfinished novel leaves traces of

an “all too personal” involvement with the Livro do Dessassosego. Zenith articulates the

personal connections to the Livro as follows:

Soares’s project is essentially a scaled-down version of Pessoa’s, and

within the trunk of multifarious writings we now know as the Pessoa

archives, The Book of Disquietude is like a smaller trunk, full of long and

short, divergent and frequently contradictory fragments written throughout

Pessoa’s adult life. O Livro is a depository not only for Soares’s ‘lucid

diary’ (f.211) and ‘haphazard musings’ (f.14) but for Fernando Pessoa’s

prose poems, literary fragments and occasional writings that had no other

home. (Centenary Pessoa 163)

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In the 2001 translation of Soares’s book Zenith writes of the similar parallels the progress

of the Livro came to have to Pessoa’s person:

In this respect, that of perpetual fragmentation, the author and his Book

were forever faithful to their principles. If Pessoa split himself into

dozens of literary characters who contradicted each other and even

themselves, The Book of Disquiet likewise multiplied without ceasing,

being first one book and then another, told by this voice then that voice,

then another, still others, all swirling and uncertain, like the cigarette

smoke through which Pessoa, sitting in a café or next to his window,

watched life go by.

[…]

[T]he more he ‘prepared’ it, the more unfinished it became. Unfinished

and unfinishable. Without a plot or plan to follow, but as disquiet as a

literary work can be, it kept growing even as its borders became ever more

indefinite and its existence as a book ever less viable—like the existence

of Fernando Pessoa as a citizen in this world. (x-xi)

Whether deliberately unfinished or not, and whether the Livro was deliberately left

fragmentary, contradictory, similar to and different from his own life, Fernando Pessoa’s

life is tied to Soares’s Livro both thematically and structurally. What the all too personal

connections show, however, is that there is no system, no key that unlocks the

understanding, no mold that encapsulates the roving self and non-selves that is Fernando

Pessoa. Whereas Caeiro, Reis, Campos, and others have biographies, personalities, and

philosophies, and all are an intellectual part of Pessoa, Soares, on the other hand, is a

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fragment of Pessoa just as Pessoa fragments himself through Soares. It is an all too

personal Soares that writes,

Assim organizar a nossa vida que ella seja para os outros um mysterio, que

quem melhor nos conheça, apenas nos desconheça de mais perto que os

outros. Eu assim talhei a minha vida, quasi que sem pensar n’isso, mas

tanta arte instintiva puz em faze-lo que para mim próprio me tornei uma

não de todo clara e nitida individualidade minha. (LD [202])

[One’s life should be so arranged that it remains a mystery to other people,

so that those who know one best in fact know one as little as anyone else,

only from a slightly nearer vantage point. That is how, almost without

thinking, I have designed my life, but such was the instinctive art I put into

it that even to myself my individuality is not entirely clear-cut or precise.

(BD [134])

We must remember this is Soares writing, not Pessoa, but certainly part of Pessoa..

While any part of Pessoa has the pen, we can revel in similarities but we cannot forget the

ironic distance of verisimilitude. As in Poole’s example of Thulstrup’s reading of

explicit references of repetition, the overt allusions to similarities Soares might have with

his “progenitor” are based on difference, fundamental, yet subtle. The difference

between Pessoa and Soares is the difference between reality and imagination, and just as

one man is the imaginary mutilation of the other man, so too is the imaginary a mutilation

of reality. Just as Pessoa has earnestly been trying to convince his readers of the reality

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of his imaginary heteronyms, he, through Bernardo Soares’s the Livro do Desassossego,

demonstrates just how “actual” the imaginary can be.

Kierkegaard and Imagination In order to avoid an accusation of “multiple redefinition of terms,”2 the word

imagination must be qualified. It is precisely the fact that Bernardo Soares rearticulates

the role the imagination has in actual life that gives Kierkegaardian “control” and

“actuality” to the irony in the Livro do Dessassosego. In his work entitled Kierkegaard’s

Dialectic of the Imagination, David J. Gouwens similarly acknowledges the importance

of qualifying the meaning of imagination as the romantics and Kierkegaard treat it in

their respective writings. After a brief analysis of the development of the concept of

romantic imagination and before addressing Kierkegaard’s attack in his dissertation of

romantic irony, Gouwens asserts an essential equivalency of semantic interpretation.

romantic imagination, Gouwens claims, is just as much under attack in The Concept of

Irony as is romantic irony, because they are virtually inseparable concepts. He bases his

entire analysis of Kierkegaard’s “dialectic of imagination” on this connection.

In the course of this critique [The Concept of Irony] of irony, Kierkegaard

indirectly judges the Romantic notion of imagination as well. Just as he

claims that the term “irony” is equivalent to the term “Romantic,” (CI

292n) so too, from our analysis of the shape of the Romantic movement,

in which “irony” and “imagination” are so closely intertwined, any

critique of “Romantic irony” is also a critique of the Romantic

2 Roger Poole describes what Kierkegaard in his dissertation does with Hegelian terms as “multiple redefinition of terms.” The issue is discussed at length in chapter four of this paper.

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imagination. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s references to the imagination in

The Concept of Irony exhibit his clear awareness that irony is a form of

imaginative life. (54)

If Gowens is correct, not only is Kierkegaard’s critique of romantic irony also a critique

of romantic imagination, but his solution for overcoming the failings of romantic irony,

namely “controlled irony,” is similarly a solution for bypassing the shortcomings of

romantic imagination.

Kierkegaard’s disagreement is with the romantic tendency to neglect the actual

while celebrating the fantastic, and indeed this discussion occupies the bulk of part two of

his dissertation. He writes:

Who would be so inhuman as not to be able to enjoy the free play of

fantasy, but that does not imply that all of life should be abandoned to

imaginative intuition. When fantasy alone gains the upper hand in this

way, it exhausts and anesthetizes the soul, robs it of all moral tension,

makes life a dream. (CI 292n)

In the earlier Lee Capel translation the Danish word phantasie is rendered as

“imagination.”

Now who is such a monster that he is unable to delight in the free play of

the imagination? But it does not follow from this that the whole of life

should be given over to imagination. When the imagination is allowed to

rule in this way it prostrates and anesthetizes the soul, robs it of all moral

tension, and makes of life a dream. (CI Capel 308n)

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romantic irony, imagination, or fantasy exhausts and anesthetizes the soul and makes of

life a dream because it denies the finite in search of the infinite. Controlled irony,

however, “limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields balance and

consistency” (CI 326). Gouwens comments, “Irony can now function to return one to

actuality, that is, to permeate the finite with the sense of the infinite in contrast to the

Romantic flight into imagination” (74). A poet, Kierkegaard argues, “lives poetically

only when he himself is oriented and thus integrated in the age in which he lives, is

positively free in the actuality to which he belongs” (CI 326). Again, the freedom to

which he refers is in stark contrast to the “freedom” exemplified by the romantics, or at

least that freedom which they claimed to have, in which mood and whim reigned

supreme. Without grounding in the actual, feeling is only moodiness, and while mood

governs, imagination becomes passive and freedom is cancelled. Thus, according to

Gouwens, “Kierkegaard’s case for actuality is that it provides a ground for feeling and

freedom. The gift and task of actuality allow feeling and freedom the proper atmosphere

in which to flourish. Imagination by itself cannot provide this atmosphere” (63).

Imagination, albeit “controlled,” mixed with a deep sense of actuality is necessary for

real feeling and positive freedom.

Although critical of romantic escapism made possible through irony and

imagination, from the above citation it is clear that Kierkegaard does not discredit the

importance of imagination, merely its subordination of the actual as a way of living. In

fact, imagination is essential to cognition and to the realization of one’s potential as a

self. In The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus,

defines imagination as “the medium for the process of infinitizing” and “the capacity

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instar omnium [for all capacities]” (31). Through the imagination one has the capacity

for abstract thinking and can acquire objective knowledge. Imagination plays a

significant role in the “aesthetic” stage of existence as well, for it provides the ideal

possibilities from which one must choose to actualize, thereby achieving one’s selfhood.3

One of the problems Kierkegaard found in Hegelian speculative philosophy was that

instead of recognizing the possibilities created in the imagination as such, the thinker

lived in that possibility thereby casting himself into the fantastic (Gowens 145).

However, in Kierkegaard’s view, the thinker must acknowledge that the possibilities

engendered in the imagination are hypothetical and abstract, reality identifying with

immediacy and ideality with mediacy (Gowens 147). Extended to the “aesthetic” stage

of existence, Gowens explains,

Possibility gains an added significance, for no longer is possibility

concerned only with the realm of ideality, with the possible in general, but

with possibility for the person. And imagination gains an added

significance, for no longer is it employed simply as the instrument that

posits the ideal, but it is engaged in the processes attending a person’s

subjectivity. (156)

The Sickness Unto Death is largely concerned with the maladies of imagination. At the

foundation of his (Kierkegaard’s and/or Anti-Climacus’s) discussion is the imbalance of

“the infinite and possibility as products of the imagination and […] the finite and

necessary elements of existence” (Gowens 160). This imbalance is divided into four

forms of despair: the despair of infinitude, in which the imagination produces only

3 Chapter four of this essay deals more profoundly with possibility as necessary for the establishment of selfhood.

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dreams; possibility, in which one recognizes the need to actualize the possibility but

despairs over which possibility to choose; finitude, in which one is wholly unable to free

oneself from the limits of the finite world; and necessity, in which one must deal with the

loss of possibility (Gowens 163-66). The task of the self, then, is to balance the finite

with the infinite by gathering the necessary possibilities generated by the imagination and

actualizing one, making the ideal and “mediate” into the real and “immediate.” Although

Gowens mentions Kierkegaard’s-A’s Johannes in “Diary of a Seducer” as one who

“strives for a complete triumph of the imagination over the actual,” he does so in order to

prove that “for all its powers, the imagination cannot give wholeness” (176-78). His

study then proceeds to the ethico-religious context for the imagination and its ability to

endow one with “wholeness.” For the purposes of this paper, however, the failings of

imagination in “Diary of a Seducer” will provide a perfect transition into the role of

imagination in Bernardo Soares’s own “diary,” the Livro do Desassossego.

Soares and Imagination

For the disquiet bookkeeper his imagination provides more than an escape from

the tedium of his quotidian reality; rather his dreams are creations of an alternate reality,

an ideality able to be controlled and manipulated, but left to occupy the abstract realm of

imagination because it is from this ideality that Soares derives more satisfaction. Unlike

the romantics criticized for their rejection of their actuality for a fantastic super-reality,

Soares does not deny his actuality nor does he dismiss it as dissatisfying. He penetrates

his daily existence with such poignancy that it would be impossible to escape his reality

even if he wanted to. In his word, he “interexists.” Soares writes of the ambiguity

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inherent in such an existence that straddles the real and the imagined, “E regresso às duas

cousas nullas em que estou certo, de nullo tambem que sou—à minha vida quotidiana de

transeunte incognito, e aos meus sonhos como insomnias de acordado” (LD [400]).

[And, being myself a nonentity, I return to the two negatives of which I am certain—my

daily life as an anonymous passer-by and the waking insomnia of my dreams] (BD [77]).

His grasp of the imaginative is similarly poignant and therefore, because he feels them

both so freely, Soares argues that his imagined reality, the ideal, is truer than his actual

one. For Soares, “é não só melhor, senão mais verdadeiro, o sonhar com Bordeus do que

desembarcar em Bordeus” (LD [388]). [(T)o dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but

truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux] (BD [75]). He does not challenge the reality of

his actuality, but merely challenges the dismissive assumption that dreams are not “real.”

More in an attitude of reverie than one of rejection or escape, he confesses to himself that

he is unable to distinguish between existent reality and the non-existent reality of dreams,

and unable to discount the realness and vitality of what he imagines:

Douro-me de poentes suppostos, mas o supposto é vivo na supposição.

Alegro-me de brisas imaginaries mas o imaginario vive quando se

imagina. Tenho alma por hypotheses varias, mas essas hypotheses teem

alma propria, e me dão portanto a que teem. Não ha problema senão o da

realidade, e esse é insoluvel e vivo. Que sei eu da differença entre uma

arvore e um sonho? Posso tocar na arvore; sei que tenho o sonho. Que é

isto, na sua verdade? (LD [171])

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I clothe myself in the gold of imagined sunsets, but what is imagined lives

on in the imagination. I gladden myself with imaginary breezes, but the

imaginary lives when it is imagined. Various hypotheses furnish me with

a soul and since each hypothesis has its own soul, each gives me the soul it

possesses. There is only one problem: reality, and that is insoluble and

alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I

can touch the tree; I know I have the dream. What does that really mean?

(BD [126])

The substance of his dreams is no more insubstantial than the substance of his reality,

though substantially different, and whereas objects and people make up real life, they

have life in the imagination as well. Again, Soares favors his imaginary relationships

with people to those of his “real” life. He writes, “As figuras imaginarias teem mais

revelo e verdade que as reaes. O meu mundo imaginario foi sempre o unico mundo

verdadeiro para mim. Nunca tive amores tão reaes, tão cheios de verve de sangue como

os que tive com figuras que eu próprio criei” (LD [367]). [Imaginary figures have more

substance and truth than real ones. My imaginary world has always been the only true

world for me. I never knew loves so real, so full of passion and life as I did with the

characters I myself created] (BD [198]). Soares describes the elements that make up his

imagination as “truer” than their counterparts in reality. Quite aware of his consciousness

of both realms or states of mind, Soares says of himself that “[s]uccede commigo que

teem egual revelo as duas realidades a que attendo. Nisto consiste a minha originalidade.

Nisto, talvez, consiste a minha tragedia, e a comedia d’ella” (LD [118]). [The two

realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps lies

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my tragedy and the comedy it is] (BD [14]). The point at which thinking and listening

overlap, the meeting of thoughts from within and from without, becomes the playground

of the imagined real. What greater description of not only art in general, but of Pessoa’s

original contribution to art and literature as well! Richard Zenith comments on

Soares’s/Pessoa’s “imaginative” way of life:

The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream,

without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfillment never measures up to what

we imagine—this was the closest thing to a message that Pessoa left, and

he gave us Bernardo Soares to show us how it’s done.

How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By

performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination.

Traveling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like

Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense

sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every

way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination. (xxiii)

Soares and Irony The introduction, sometimes called the preface, to the Livro do Desassossego sets

the tone for ironic indirect communication. Signed by Fernando Pessoa, the introduction

gives a physical and conceptual description of Soares and supplies a series of fictional

reminiscences of interactions between the two. This short presentation reveals again the

genius of Pessoan creation. The setting, atmosphere and character description complete

with internal musings and observations made by Pessoa, omniscient in the scene, all

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speak to Pessoa’s tendency to poetic dramatization. Yet there is a reality to the

introduction that penetrates the reader’s knowledge that the encounters described never

occurred in actuality but certainly and vividly took place in Pessoa’s imagination.

Suddenly the reader’s perception of reality is challenged, and the journey into Soares’s

complete and Pessoa’s “semi” disquietude begins.

It is quite easy to read Soares’s ideas and feelings as if they reflected Pessoa’s

own inner world, and admittedly, not wrong to do so. Yes, Soares is Pessoa’s semi-

heteronym, but he is also a “literary personality” as constructed and imaginary as the

others. It is Soares, merely a part Pessoa, that favors so much the imagination, for his

essence is exactly that substance for whose reality he advocates, and yet it was Pessoa’s

persistent hand that actually pushed the pen or touched the type of Soares’s confessions

and arguments, and it is Pessoa who found in his imagination the relationships that so

eluded him in his actual life. This irony perpetuates Soares’s existence by giving him

substance. In the introduction we learn of Soares’s external reality and in the Livro we

learn of his inner reality, all the while maintaining awareness that that reality, an arsenal

of heartfelt confessions meant to persuade the reader why imagined reality is truer than

the real one behind it, is in truth imagined.

Soares himself explicitly addresses the role of irony in positing subjectivity. Of

the two passages Pessoa chose to publish from his collection of disquiet musings, the

following is an excerpt from the second. He writes:

O homem superior difere do homem inferior, e dos animais irmãos deste,

pela simples qualidade da ironia. A ironia é o primeiro indício de que a

consciência se tornou consciente. E a ironia atravessa dois estádios: o

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estádio marcado por Sócrates, quando disse “sei só que nada sei,” e o

estádio marcado por Sanches, quando disse “nem sei se nada sei.” O

primeiro passo chega áquele ponto em que duvidamos de nós

dogmáticamente, e todo homem superior o dá atinge. O Segundo passo

chega áquele ponto em que duvidamos do nós e da nossa dúvida, e poucos

homens o têm atingido na curta extensão já tão longa do tempo que,

humanidade, temos visto o sol e a noite sôbre a vária superfície da terra.

(LD [479])

[What distinguishes the superior man from the inferior man and from the

latter’s animal brothers is the simple quality of irony. Irony is the first

indication that consciousness has become conscious and it passes through

two stages: the stage reached by Socrates when he said ‘I only know that I

know nothing,’ and the stage reached by Sanches when he said “I do not

even know that I know nothing.’ The first stage is that point at which we

dogmatically doubt ourselves and it’s a point that every superior man will

reach. The second stage is the point at which we doubt both ourselves and

our doubt and, in the brief yet long curve of time during which we, as

humans, have watched the sun rise and the night fall over the varied

surface of the earth, that is a stage very few men have reached.] (BD

[248])

The above paragraph is part of a larger discussion about the definition of man and for

Soares, the defining characteristic of a truly superior man is one who succeeds in

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doubting not only himself and his own knowledge, but his doubt as well. The vehicle for

this process is irony, an irony, however, that surpasses that as laid out by Socrates, or

rather by Socrates’s life. Although superior, Socrates’s irony is merely the first stage

through which one must pass in order to reach consciousness of one’s consciousness.

Socrates gives way to the irony of Portuguese humanist and philosopher Francisco

Sanches, whose ideas anticipated later Cartesian thinking.4 If, as Soares suggests,

Socratic irony as negative freedom is negated in the irony of Sanches, the negation of a

negative might posit then an affirmation, and as stated before, negation in

Pessoa/Campos/Soares is often a sign of affirmation. The above excerpt leaves little

doubt that Pessoa was quite certain he, master of irony, was one of those “poucos” that

had ascended to the second stage of superior irony. Soares, in fact, initiates the

discussion of irony with a positive definition when he says irony is the first indication

that the consciousness has become conscious. The Kierkegaardian equivalent of such a

statement might be that through irony the subject establishes his positive subjectivity.

Whereas Socrates, according to Kierkegaard, brought the subjective self into existence in

response to external conditions such as state pressure for communal thought, Soares,

according to Pessoa, soars above his immediate surroundings, even his corporeal

grounding, and leaps into the realm of the intangible, the imagination. Dreams,

consciousness, imagined realities, these are what make up the bookkeeper’s existence,

and rightfully so, since he himself is a dream, an imagined personality that has taken on a

reality in actuality, an instantiation of a poet’s conscious consciousness. Soares

elaborates:

4 Franciscvs Sanchez c.1551-1623 published the Tractatus de multam nobili et prima universali scientia quod nihil scitur, his major work, in Lugduni: Ant. Gryphium, 1581.

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Conhecer-se é errar, e o oráculo que disse “Conhece-te” propôs uma tarefa

maior que as de Hércules e um enigma mais negro que o da Esfinge.

Desconhecer-se conscientemente, eis o caminho. E desconhecer-se

conscientemente é o emprego activo da ironia. Nem conheço coisa maior,

nem mais própria do homem que é deveras grande, que a análise paciente

e expressive dos modos de nos desconhecermos, o registro consciente da

inconsciência das nossas consciências, a metafisica das sombras

autónomas, a poesia do crepúsculo da desilusão. (LD [479])

[To know oneself is to err, and the oracle who said ‘Know thyself’

proposed a task greater than all of Hercules’ labors and an enigma even

more obscure than that of the Sphinx. To unknow onself consciously, that

is the right path to follow. And to unknow oneself consciously is the

active task of irony. I know no greater nor more proper task for the truly

great man than the patient, expressive analysis of ways of unknowing

ourselves, the conscious registering of the unconsciousness of our

consciousnesses, the metaphysics of the autonomous shadows, the poetry

of the twilight of disillusion.] (BD [248])

In The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard establishes Socrates’s negativity by arguing

the phrase γνώδι σαυτόν [know yourself] has been misunderstood because it has been

removed from the context it which the command is given. Determined to explain what

the phrase meant to Socrates, Kierkegaard writes:

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Now it is certainly true that the phrase γνώδι σαυτόν can designate

subjectivity in its fullness, inwardness in its utterly infinite wealth, but for

Socrates this self-knowledge was not so copious; it actually contained

nothing more than the separating, the singling out, of what later became

the object of knowledge. The phrase “know yourself” means: separate

yourself from the other. Precisely because this self did not exist prior to

Socrates, it was once again an oracular pronouncement corresponding to

Socrates’ consciousness that commanded him to know himself. But it was

reserved for a later age to go deeply into this self-knowledge. (177-178

my emphasis)

Even Kierkegaard, with Socrates as his model and front, was setting the stage for a

modern understanding of self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Perhaps the brooding

Dane never imagined just how far Fernando Pessoa would go to separate himself from

the others that made up his subjectivity, but he was certainly aware that self-knowledge

would advance beyond, although built upon, Socrates’s ironic negative subjectivity.

Again, in the above excerpt from the Livro do Dessassosego Soares plays with negation

and affirmation, although this time he begins with a negation and progresses by negating

with a positive: “Conhecer é errar,” and then, “desconhecer-se conscientemente eis o

caminho.” Kierkegaard, too, argues that in relation to “Greek substantiality” Socrates’s

charge and attempt to know himself and help others to do so had a completely negative

effect.

This principle “know yourself,” is entirely congruous with the ignorance

previously described. The reason he [Socrates] could continue to insist

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upon this negative point is the same as before, because his life and task

were to affirm it—not speculatively, for then he would have had to go

further, but to affirm it practically against every single human being.

Therefore he placed individuals under his dialectical vacuum pump,

pumped away the atmospheric air they were accustomed to breathing, and

left them standing there. For them, everything was now lost, except to the

extent that they were able to breathe ethereal air. (CI 178)

Kierkegaard links the principle of self-knowledge with that of Socrates’ ignorance—that

he only knew that he knew nothing. By affirming his ignorance, by unknowing himself,

he was able to affirm his subjectivity and self-knowledge and able to separate himself

from the others. Able to arrive “at the definition of knowledge that made the individual

alien to the immediacy in which he had previously lived” Socrates, the vacuum, helped

others to see and experience beyond the actual to the ethereal, to consciousness, and the

intangible, the world of Bernardo Soares. Socrates’s pupils were left alone and empty

because Socrates was negativity, but he left in them the ability to “breathe ethereal air” or

establish their own subjectivity.

Soares, however, seems to invert the process of ironic Socratic dialectic. Instead

of negative freedom giving rise to positive subjectivity as evidenced in Socrates’s

relationship with his pupils, a doubly negated irony made positive by doubting even one’s

doubt gives rise to a negative subjectivity, the ability to “un-know” oneself. This

negative subjectivity finds its substance in the realm of the imagined, which is a

reflection, a possibility, of its positive actuality. Soares does not need Socrates to strip

his life bare of immediacy and even corporeality in order to get him to breathe ethereal

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air. Instead, Soares is already quite literally half in the immediate, the real, and half in

the “mediate,” the imagined since he is half Fernando Pessoa and half himself. Soares

leaps from imagined sunset to imagined love, asserting a reality he (and Pessoa) knows

he does not have. In this way he (and Pessoa) consciously unknows himself, reveling in

the “poetry of the twilight of disillusion” (BD [479]).

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Pseudonymity [and heteronymity?] is not itself indirection. Pseudonymity [and

heteronymity?] is part of a larger aesthetic design, which itself is half of a more widely

conceived indirect communication. Roger Poole

But this is my limitation—I am a pseudonym. Fervently, incitingly, I present the ideal,

and when the listener or reader is moved to tears, then I still have one job left: to say, “I

am not that, my life is not like that.” Søren Kierkegaard.

Eu não escrevo em Português. Escrevo eu mesmo. Fernando Pessoa

And what was flesh became word. Richard Zenith

The ironist is a priori unassimilable to any System. Roger Poole

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Chapter Four

Multiple Redefinings

“Multiple Redefinition of Terms” One of the more enlightening results of recent re-readings of Kierkegaard’s The

Concept of Irony is the realization that the purpose of Kierkegaard’s use of Hegelian

terms and logic was to demonstrate or “actualize” the concept of irony instead of merely

“speculating” about it. Kierkegaard’s dissertation was just as much a game with the

Danish Hegelian scholarship of his time and with Hegelianism itself as it was an analysis

of Socratic, romantic, and Hegelian irony. Kierkegaard’s seeming attacks on Hegel’s

conception of objectivity and infinite negativity were more directly critical of

contemporary Danish thought, specifically that which he received as a student under

Hegel scholars such as Hans Lessen Martensen and others at the University of

Copenhagen in the 1830s.1 That Martensen refused to appear at Kierkegaard’s scheduled

defense indicates the professor had not missed the irony that ridiculed his own

longstanding interpretations of Hegelian philosophy. Roger Poole compares

Kiekegaard’s use of Hegelian terms to Legos and claims that throughout The Concept of

Irony Kierkegaard deliberately and continuously redefines terms laden with Hegelian

context in order to fit them together to form different concluding images. He writes:

The Hegelian machinery was used, yet the Hegelian terminology was

emptied of all substance. Kierkegaard also carried out a kind of harrying,

1 Poole argues, “The Danish Hegelians, rather than Hegel himself, were the target [of Kierkegaard’s wit]. The early ‘indirect’ texts, then—pseudonymous, ‘aesthetic,’ Romantic-ironic, mocking, titillating, provocative—were all cast in the mode of a kind of pseudoHegelianism, in which the fashionable Hegelian terminology and layout were used while, at the same time, every term in the Hegelian terminology was subverted, deprived of meaning, and emptied of content” (2).

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hectoring, guerilla praxis with the terms themselves, playing with them in

such a way as they were deployed in a pattern of self-canceling oxymoron.

Such terms as positive and negative, finite and infinite, subjective and

objective, were obviously an endless resource for parodic intent. (3)

This “multiple redefinition of terms” is the vehicle for Kierkegaard’s ironic jabs at

Martensen and others who believed themselves in full understanding of Hegel’s

phenomenology and convinced of the comprehensiveness of Hegel’s world historical

system. The aim and object of Kierkegaard’s multiple redefinition of terms, Poole

argues, is to drive constantly toward creating an aporia (49). Socrates as ironist, and

irony itself are unassimilable to any System, even and especially to Hegel’s. Later in his

aesthetic works, Kierkegaard designates other concepts such as angst, the leap, faith, the

absurd, and the moment as incompatible and incommensurable entities. Irony in

particular is not only unassimilable, but is itself a gesture of refusal to any System

whatsoever (Poole 45-46).

Add to this tendency toward redefinition of terms and concepts a tendency toward

redefinition of personae. Ironically, scholars attempting to understand and interpret

Kierkegaard’s works and personal writings largely have overlooked his use of

pseudonyms. Until 1846 with the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript,

Kierkegaard based his method of indirect communication in irony both within his

writings and in authorial relation to them. The pseudonyms were not the indirect

communication itself but merely a way to achieve authorial distance necessary to give

irony a place to play. After 1846 Kierkegaard bid farewell to the pseudonyms and to

ironic indirect communication. At the end of Postscript in an appendix-like declaration

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entitled “A First and Last Explanation,” Kierkegaard acknowledges that he is indeed the

author of the works signed under the names Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio,

Constantin Constantius, Hilarius Bookbinder and the others, “something,” he writes, “that

really can scarcely be of interest to anyone to know” (Postscript [625]). He then pleads

with his readers to distinguish between the pseudonyms and not to confuse the views of

one pseudonym with another and most importantly not to confuse those views with

Kierkegaard’s own. Kierkegaard’s insistence that his role in writing the pseudonymous

texts was little more than that of a “souffleur [prompter]” and his argument that the

pseudonyms must stand alone in relation to their texts calls to mind Pessoa’s neologism,

“heteronym,” which might be suitably applied to Kierkegaard’s “authors.” Most

Kierkegaardian scholarship, however, until recently has disregarded Kierkegaard’s plea

and ignored the distance he placed between himself and his pseudonyms (Poole 84).

Perhaps it is another twist of irony that for decades while Kierkegaard’s early works were

being read in earnest, the last few pages of his, rather Johannes Climacus’s, Concluding

Unscientific Postscript were not. A possible explanation for this trend in scholarship is

the Corsair affair.

On December 22, 1845 J.P. Møller published an article critiquing Kierkegaard’s

(Hilarius Bookbinder’s, William Afham’s, the Judge’s and Frater Taciturnus’s) Stages on

Life’s Way. The article was superficially favorable, but it was obvious its author had

entirely missed the point of Kierkegaard’s treatise. Kierkegaard responded with two

articles of his own that not only sought to set Møller straight but also to discredit him

since Kierkegaard viewed him as opportunistic. Møller was seeking a position at the

university but was secretly publishing his articles in the Corsair. Kierkegaard’s articles

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prompted a backlash that resulted in a series of personal attacks that tainted the Danish

philosopher’s image forever. The Corsair began publishing degrading cartoons depicting

a brooding, hunchbacked, silly Kierkegaard by caricaturing his appearance and his habits.

Accustomed to taking long walks along the streets of Copenhagen among the people, the

populace soon recognized Kierkegaard only for the images and cartoons found repeatedly

in the Corsair. Although a very public individual, Kierkegaard found himself subject to

ridicule even by the children on the streets. Not only did the cartoons play off of

Kierkegaard’s personal characteristics, but those of his pseudonyms as well, blurring any

corporeal distinctions between the author and pseudo-authors. After such a personal

attack, particularly an attack to the body, Kierkegaard was stripped of the ironic distance

that sustained the pseudonyms. Poole writes of the affair, “The works of the pseudonyms

had been permeated by irony, which distances the speaker from what he says. That ironic

cover had been blown. Now, in the cartoons of The Corsair, the works of all the

pseudonyms were directly attributed to Kierkegaard himself, and his editors and

characters ransacked for spicy illustrations” (16). The master of irony was compelled to

relinquish his staff. In a journal entry in September1846 after the effects of the entire

affair were fully realized, Kierkegaard wrote:

It was really ironic of me to live so much on the streets and avenues while

I was writing the pseudonymous works. The irony consisted of belonging

to a completely different sphere qua author and spending so much time on

the streets and in the markets. The irony was directed at the intellectual,

affected Hegelian forces we have, or had, here at home. But as soon as

there is an attempt from another corner, by literary rabble barbarism, to

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make it seem that I really belong on the street, then the irony quite

properly disappears and I take exception to the forum. (Journals and

Papers 5:5937)

The consequences of the Corsair affair might explain why Kierkegaard had to turn from

the use of irony as his method of indirect communication or at least show why a return to

ironic communication was thereafter impossible, but it was also the beginning of a

historical tradition only now beginning to be challenged of identifying Kierkegaard with

his pseudonyms and their views despite his request to the contrary.

Fernando Pessoa has not had nearly as much trouble convincing his readers to

separate him from his heteronyms. Although Pessoa certainly took his insistence of

distance to higher levels than did Kierkegaard, Pessoa’s success may have resulted from

little more than the playing out of history. Unsatisfied with merely different names to

match varying views, Pessoa ensured his heteronyms had individual biographies and

varying physical appearances and stimulated an internal circular dialogue in which they

affirm one another’s actuality. Pessoa’s masquerade infiltrated every aspect of his life.

Those who worked closely with Pessoa shared in the charade of multiplicity by meeting,

on occasion, Álvaro de Campos, when the mood struck Pessoa so to introduce “himself.”

Once the poet Alfredo Pedro Guisado played a joke on his friend Antônio Ferro. Ferro

had never been informed of Pessoa’s heteronyms and their writings, and Guisado

determined to convince Ferro that Alberto Caeiro was a poet rising in contemporary

popularity. Pessoa recounts the story in a 1914 letter to Côrtes-Rodrigues.

O Guisado encontrou o Ferro acompanhado de um amigo, caixeiro-

viajante, aliás. E começou a falar no Caeiro, como tendo-lhe sido

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apresentado, e tendo trocado duas palavras apenas com ele. “Se calhar é

qualquer lepidopteron,” disse o Ferro. “Nunca ouvi falar nele…” E, de

repente, soa, inesperada, a voz do caixeiro-viajante: “Eu já ouvi falar

nesse poeta, e até me parece que já li alugures uns versos dele.” Hein?

Para o caso de tirar todas as possíveis suspeitas futuras ao Ferro não se

podia exigir melhor. O Guisado ia ficando doente de riso reprimido, mas

conseguiu continuar a ouvir. E não voltou ao assunto, visto o caixeiro-

viajante ter feito tudo o que era necessário. (37-38)

[Guisado met up with Ferro, who was accompanied by a friend, who was a

traveling salesman. And Guisado started talking about Caeiro, about

having been introduced to him and their having exchanged a few words.

“I’ll bet he’s some fly-brained fellow,” said Ferro. “I’ve never even heard

of him…” Suddenly and unexpectedly, the traveling salesman piped up:

“I’ve heard of this poet and it even seems to me that I’ve read some of his

verses.” What? One couldn’t have asked for anything better to allay any

possible future doubt Ferro might have. Guisado nearly got sick from

holding back his laughter, but he managed to go on listening. He never

broached the subject again because the salesman had done everything that

was necessary.] (Sadlier 75)

Pessoa’s personal correspondence with colleagues is also seasoned with explanations of

the genesis of the heteronyms and references to their individual works. The overall tone

of Pessoa’s letters and that of commentaries made by those of his literary circle is

markedly different from the passion and zeal with which the poet markets his oeuvre

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from within its own verses. For his fellow-poets at the Presença office, Pessoa

maintained dignified composure, playing the eccentric innovator in order to convince his

colleagues of the serious “workplay” of his multiplicity. Aside from the few with whom

the poet corresponded and the few poems he published in his lifetime, he held a rather

limited readership that paralleled a relatively secluded life. The subsequent mystery

surrounding Fernando Pessoa’s person is perhaps the reason he has posthumously been

able to convince his readers to separate him from his heteronyms, for it was only until

after his death, after his body was no more alive than those of his creations, that Pessoa’s

readership expanded to the public-at-large.

Role of the Reader2 The role of the reader is a crucial one for the playing out of the irony that

suspends both Pessoa and Kierkegaard’s use of literary personalities. Irony certainly

creates the distance necessary for these authors to poetically create themselves and their

pseudo/heteronyms, but irony also requires a reader in order to initiate the chase for

meaning and understanding. Poole says of the crucial need for a reader of the indirect

texts:

The aim of the early indirect communication is to involve the reader […]

for little of the work of Wolfgang Iser and his followers is new to the

pseudonymous Kierkegaardian authors of the 1840s. The reader has to be

gathered in as a potential ally, seduced and intrigued by the typographical

and rhetorical waylayings of the text, and then involved in a kind of

2 Much of the progress of my argument relies heavily on the layout of Mark C. Taylor’s division of chapter two entitled “B. Socratic Midwifery: Method and Intention of the Authorship” comprising of pages 51-62.

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detective work, up to that point where (under ideal conditions) there is no

unadorned instruction or doctrine or objective fact to be had, but only the

mutually shared experience of perplexity. (9-10)

For Mark Taylor, however, the pseudonymous works have another more ethical

fulfillment for their readers as well as that of the “shared experience of perplexity.”

According to Kierkegaard, the pseudonyms were more embodiments of their ideas and

ideals rather than “real” or “actual” people, the extent to which Pessoa will take his

heteronyms only a generation later. In The First and Last Explanation Kierkegaard

designates the pseudonyms as “poetically actual subjective thinker[s]” (Postscript [626]).

Their purpose is to “poetically” or indirectly represent different points of view, different

“life-views” [Livs-Anskuelse] or ideal possibilities, which the reader may analyze and

then adapt into her life depending on whether or not, in her opinion, it will help her in the

process of becoming, of shaping her selfhood. According to Mark C. Taylor,

Kiekegaard’s pseudonyms and the ideals represented are not merely a game of choices

for the reader, but an ethically guided pathway toward truth. For this reason, Kierkegaard

needed the distance of irony to keep his own views and personality as far away from his

pseudonyms as possible in order to allow the reader to see her own stage of existence and

not his. It is Kierkegaard’s attempt at Socratic midwifery. 3 In the preface to Stages on

Life’s Way, Kierkegaard observes of his pseudonymous writings, “Such works are

mirrors: when a monkey peers into them, no Apostle can be seen looking out” (8), a

quote Kierkegaard attributes to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The works of the

3 Mark C. Taylor calls Kiekegaard’s use of pseudonyms to present the reader with possible “life-views” “Socratic Midwifery.” The presentation to the reader of possibilities and the reader’s will to actualize demonstrate an aspect of Kierkegaard’s method of “indirect communication” and “double reflection” through which he proves that truth is subjectivity. See Taylor’s chapter two.

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pseudonyms, although, as Taylor will argue, ultimately directed toward an ethical

becoming of a Christian Self,4 first act as mirrors through which the reader can see only

herself and where she stands in the process of developing her own subjectivity, of

becoming her true Self (57). Irony and distance keep Kierkegaard, the true author, out of

the reflection of the reader that the pseudonyms offer. He writes in his journal, “When in

reflection upon the communication the receiver is reflected upon, then we have ethical

communication. The maieutic. The communicator disappears, as it were, makes himself

serve only to help the other become.” (Journals and Papers 1:657)

Because Kierkegaard sees himself as the communicator whose purpose is to help

the reader in the act of becoming, it should not be surprising that the pseudonymous

works have an overall design. The dialogue and communication extend from between the

pseudonyms and the reader to among the various pseudonyms themselves, a doubly

dialectical method reminiscent of Socrates (Taylor 59). Taylor writes, “Not only do the

pseudonymous authors attempt to draw the reader into the dialogue with each other, but

they also attempt to draw the reader into the dialogue. If the pseudonymous works are

properly understood, the reader becomes a participant in the dialogue, and Kierkegaard

becomes a Socratic midwife who interrogates his interlocutor” (60). Kierkegaard later

writes that the role of a Socratic midwife is the highest relationship one human being can

offer another (Philosophical Fragments 10). Despite the argument that Kierkegaard

designed his works to lead the reader to a certain mode of being, Kierkegaard himself

regarded his role as “communicator” or “midwife” as one that produced, like Socrates, no

concrete result but only a sting. In his journal he records:

4 Taylor writes, “Kierkegaard is not, of course, indifferent to which life-view his reader appropriates. […] [T]he arrangement of the possibilities of existence is designed to lead the individual to genuine selfhood, which can be reached only through the Christian mode of existence” (58-59).

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The fact that many of Plato’s dialogues end without a result has a far

deeper basis than I had thought earlier. They are a reproduction of

Socrates’ maieutic skill which makes the reader or hearer himself active,

and therefore they do not end in a result but in a sting. This is an excellent

parody of the modern rote-method which says everything the sooner the

better and all at one time, which awakens no self-action but only leads the

reader to rattle it off like a parrot. (Journals 4:4266)

Whether or not Kierkegaard intended to guide the reader’s development and becoming to

a certain end with the various possibilities offered by the pseudonyms, he certainly

desired to cause the reader to reflect more upon her current stage of existence and sought

to challenge that reader into a willful, active participation in constructing her self. The

tools of Kierkegaard’s subjective midwifery were the “poetic” pseudonyms and his

method was the irony that distanced him from those tools.

As mentioned above in the discussion concerning Kiekegaard’s Repetition,

deception through verisimilitude is another form of irony frequently employed by the

Danish eiron. Many episodes found throughout the pseudonymous works are replete

with details that tantalizingly parallel instances in Kierkegaard’s own life. Perhaps these

parallels also served historically to identify Kierkegaard with his pseudonyms. All part

of the chosen mode of communication, Kierkegaard simultaneously separated from and

drew himself close to his pseudonyms. Poole insists, “But the pseudonyms themselves

are fakes, the dummies that mime and simulate a drama of inwardness which is at once

unendurable and inexpressible. The very similarity of their stories to Kierkegaard’s is the

trap. The nearer their suggestions come to looking like a statement of the biographical

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truth, the richer the occasion for authorial inventiveness for hiding or distorting it” (11).

However, once that “ironic” distance between Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms was

destroyed, the verisimilitude became similitude and he had to abandon irony and turn to a

different form of communication, one not quite as indirect.5

Multiple Redefinition of Self

Whether a result of or merely exacerbated by the consequences of the Corsair

affair, Kierkegaard was historically doomed to repeated (and disregarded) explanations

and justifications for his use of pseudonyms. With his image and body inseparably

linked with the views and characteristics of his pseudonymous authors, Kierkegaard’s

aspirations for Socratic midwifery through irony were severely inhibited. Fernando

Pessoa was able to continue the work Kierkegaard began.6 Whereas Kierkegaard

defined, manipulated, and mastered the use of irony, Pessoa lived it. Call it “moral

luck”7 that the details of Pessoa’s private and relatively short life went just as

unpublished as the majority of his works. The lack of referential facts clouds the

distinction between real and imagined, biographical and “heteronymical,” so that Pessoa,

unhindered, posthumously reveals and conceals the truth about himself by calling into

question the very existence of such truth.

Pessoa’s success in engendering earnest acknowledgment of the “actual

subjectivity” of his heteronym comes from the fact that he himself refuses to be defined 5 See Roger Poole’s argument in his introduction that after the Corsair affair and the abandonment of pseudonymous writing Kierkegaard’s indirect communication had to find a different methodology (although Kierkegaard’s journals seem to indicate that he was finished with the pseudonymous project even before the degrading pictures were published by the Corsair). 6 Although successful at maintaining a distance between himself and his “poetically actual subjective thinker[s]” in order to provide possibilities for the reader, something Kierkegaard was ultimately unable to sustain, Pessoa’s project does not involve an attempt to guide the reader to an ethical, Christian telos. 7 See chapter three of this paper for a contextual explanation of Roger Poole’s designation of “moral luck.”

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or assimilated into even a vague biographically, theoretically characterized “System.”

Instead he loses his own self in a multiple redefinition of that self that renders all

possibilities exactly and only that—a possibility, but never an actuality.

Whereas Kierkegaard’s dissertation and subsequent pseudonymous works,

through the vehicle of irony, mock specific Hegelian ideas and particular Hegelian

scholars, Pessoa’s challenge is to the entire literary, psychological, and sociological

world. The heteronyms, much like Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, represent certain

philosophies and psychologies, certain selves, and much like Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms,

Pessoa’s selves offer possibilities. Instead of leading to an ethical development of a

Christian self, however, the possibilities presented by the heteronyms are a demonstration

of the complexity, even the multiplicity, of one’s self. Kierkegaard’s objectivity and

subjectivity are Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos; his infinite and finite,

Pessoa’s “ortônimo” and Ricardo Reis; his positive and negative, Pessoa’s volatile

Bernardo Soares and his counterpart the Baron de Teive.8 Just as Hegel’s system

becomes a game of Legos in The Concept of Irony through constant redefinition of

Hegel’s terms, Pessoa’s project remains suspended in ironic harmony through a constant

redefinition of self. Just as Keirkegaard shows that certain concepts are unassimilable

into any system, Pessoa posits that the self is similarly indefinable. Though countless

studies have been published delineating the defining characteristics of each of the

heteronyms, Pessoa trumps them all with his own, elusive, “self.” He is none and all of

his heteronyms; he espouses some and none of their philosophies; he is multiple and yet

8 The Baron of Teive is yet another heteronym to whom is attributed only one “manuscript” entitled “A Educação do Estóico,” which was written on the eve of the Baron’s suicide. According to Zenith, many of the fragments contained in the envelope designated as material for Soares’s Livro do Desassossego had Teive’s name scribbled in the margins (xxi).

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empty of personality. Pessoa existed in his writing and wrote his existence. The only

information available about Fernando Pessoa the once living entity comes from his own

writings and a few biographical tidbits from friends, colleagues, and a supposed lover.

Thus scholars are left almost exclusively with Pessoa’s treasure chest of writings in order

to piece together the Portuguese genius of the twentieth century and are subsequently at

the mercy of what Pessoa wants them to read, know, and think about him. “Moral luck,”

or a masterfully orchestrated checkmate?

Whereas Kierkegaard left his philosophical posterity with numerous clues and

delineations of what has come to be known as his philosophy of self, Fernando Pessoa,

forever masking and cloaking, not only embedded his “philosophy” in his literature, but

he lived it as well, the material of his mask and cloak being fabricated of the nothingness

of his irony. Tucked away in his trunk of posthumous glory was a small prose piece that

was intended to be the preface of a to-be published collection of the works of his

heteronyms. In it we seem to be confronted with a treatise written by the “real” Pessoa,

but he smartly reminds us that his shadow is not so easily pinned down, and not only by

referring to himself in the third (or perhaps the fourth or fifth) person. In a few

paragraphs Pessoa takes his reader through a round of possibilities not unlike those ideas

he offers through his heteronyms or that Kierkegaard presents through his pseudonyms.

Rather than optional life-views, in his projected preface Pessoa offers the reader possible

explanations for his (and by extension, perhaps, the reader’s) multiplicity. Perhaps some

might wonder if Fernando Pessoa suffered from an acute mental malady. In true non-

committal fashion so typical of Pessoa he writes of this possibility:

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Que esta qualidade [multiplicidade] no escritor seja uma forma da

hysteria, ou da chamada dissociação da personalidade, o autor destes

livros nem o contesta, nem o apóia. De nada lhe serviriam, escravo como

é da multiplicidade de si proprio, que concordasse com esta, ou com

aquela, teoria, sobre os resultados escritos dessa multiplicidade. (Prosa

82)

[If this quality (of multiplicity) found in the writer is a form of hysteria, or

what might be called disassociation of personality, the author of these

books does not contest it nor support it. It serves no purpose to him, slave

as he is to his own multiplicity, if he agrees with this or with that theory

about the written results of this multiplicity.]

Others might suppose the circumstances surrounding Pessoa’s professional, social, and

love life led him to his reclusive tendencies. His project could be explained by a desire to

escape his modern reality made repugnant because of some event or relationship in his

childhood or later. To these socio-analytical and psychoanalytically bent readers Pessoa

writes:

Com uma tal falta de literatura, como há hoje, que pode um homem de

gênio fazer senão converter-se, ele só, em uma literatura? Com uma falta

de gente coexistível, como há hoje, que pode um homem de sensibilidade

fazer senão inventar os seus amigos, ou quando menos, os seus

companheiros de espírito? (Prosa 83)

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[With such a lack of literature as exists today, what can a man of genius do

except convert himself, his self, into a literature? With such a lack of

cohabitable people as exists today, what can a man of sensibility do except

invent his friends, or more importantly, his soul mates?]

And also:

É possível que, mais tarde, outros indivíduos, deste mesmo gênero de

verdadeira realidade, apareçam. Não sei; mas serão sempre bem-vindos à

minha vida interior, onde convivem melhor comigo do que eu consigo

viver com a realidade externa. (Prosa 83)

[It is possible that eventually other individuals of this same genre of true

reality will appear. I don’t know; but they will always be welcome to my

interior life, where they live together better with me than I manage to live

with external reality.]

Still there may be some readers that might interpret Pessoa’s multiplicity as anxiety à la

Harold Bloom, attributing his heteronymic drama to a characteristically modern attempt

at subduing his literary predecessors in order to carve a space for himself amid the annals

of canonized masterpieces. To these Pessoa offers, again, without committing:

Nem esta obra, nem as que lhe seguirão têm nada que ver com quem as

escreve. Ele nem concorda com o que nelas vai escrito, nem discorda.

Como se lhe fosse ditado, escreve. […] O autor humano deste livros não

conhece em si próprio personalidade nenhuma. Quando acaso sente uma

personalidade emergir dentro de si, cedo vê que é um ente differente do

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que ele é, embora parecido; filho mental, talvez, e com qualidades

herdadas, mas as diferenças de ser outrem. (Prosa 82)

[Neither this work nor those that will follow it have anything to do with

who writes them. He does not agree with what is written in them, nor

does he disagree. As if it had been dictated to him, he writes. (… ) The

human author of these books does not recognize in himself any personality

at all. When by chance he feels a personality emerge from inside of him,

he quickly sees that it is a creature quite different from what he is, though

similar; a mental offspring, maybe, and with inherited qualities but the

differences of being someone else.]

To those who try to wade through the heteronyms and their philosophies in a vain attempt

at drawing the complete biographical figure of the “real,” “natural” Pessoa, he says:

Escuso de dizer que com partes das teorias deles [os heterónimos]

concordo, e que não concordo com outras partes. Estas cousas são

perfeitamente indiferentes. Se eles escrevem cousas belas, essas cousas

são belas, independentemente de quaisquer considerações metafísicas

sobre os autores ‘reais’ delas. Se nas suas filosofias, dizem quaisquer

verdades—se verdades há num mundo que é o não haver nada—essas

cousas são verdadeiras independentemente da intenção ou da ‘realidade’

de quem as disse. (Prosa 83)

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[I take liberty to say that I agree with parts of their (the heteronyms’)

theories, and that I disagree with other parts. These things are completely

inconsequential. If they write beautiful things, these things are beautiful

independent of whatever metaphysical considerations might exist

concerning their ‘real’ authors. If in their philosophies they utter any

truths—if truths exist in a world that is “there being nothing”—these

things are true independent of the intention or the ‘reality’ of who said

them.]

Pessoa even addresses the possibility that some of his readers (the author of this paper

included) might call the entire project an ingenious game that questions everything, not

the least of which is the notion of reality or realness. To us he writes, calling himself the

“apparent” author as opposed to the “real” one, “porque não sabemos o que seja a

realidade” [because we do not know what reality might be],

Afirmar que estes homens todos diferentes, todos bem definidos, que lhe

[o autor] passaram pela alma incorporadamente, não existem—não pode

faze-lo o autor destes livros; porque não sabe o que é existir, nem qual,

Hamlet ou Shakespeare, é que é mais real, ou real na verdade. […] Se me

disserem que é absurdo falar assim de quem nunca existiu, respondo que

também não tenho provas de que Lisboa tenha alguma vez existido, ou eu

que escrevo, ou qualquer cousa que seja. (Prosa 82-83)

[The confirmation that these men—all different, all very defined, who

emerged incorporally through his (the author’s) soul—do not exist cannot

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be made by the author of these books; because [he] does not know what it

means to exist, nor who—Hamlet or Shakespeare—is more real, or really

real. (…) If you tell me that it is absurd to speak this way of someone

who never existed, I reply that I have no more proof that Lisbon, or I, who

write, or any other thing has ever existed at some point in time.]

To complete the charade Pessoa ends his preface with the following paragraph:

Tenho, na minha visão a que chamo interior apenas porque chamo exterior

a determinado ‘mundo,’ plenamente fixas, nítidas, conhecidas e distintas,

as linhas fisionômicas, os traços de caráter, a vida, a ascendência, nalguns

casos a morte, destas personagems. Alguns conheceram-se uns aos outros;

outros não. A mim, pessoalmente, nenhum me conheceu, exceto Álvaro

de Campos. Mas, se amanha eu, viajando na América, encontrasse

subitamente a pessoa física de Ricardo Reis, que, a meu ver, lá vive,

nenhum gesto de pasmo me sairia da alma para o corpo; estava certo tudo,

mas, antes disso já estava certo. O que é a vida? (Prosa 83-84)

[I have in my vision that I call interior—only because I call a certain

‘world’ exterior—determined, absolutely fixed, crisp, recognized and

distinct, the physiognomic lines, the character traces, the life, the

ascendance, and in some cases, the death of these people. Some met each

other; others no. Me personally, none met me except Álvaro de Campos.

But if tomorrow, traveling to America, I were to suddenly run into the

physical person of Ricard Reis, who in my opinion lives there, no gasp of

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surprise would escape from my soul; all was well, but before this all was

already well. What is life?]

What could be more convincing than the author’s own word that he actually met one of

his imaginary heteronyms! Rather, what could be more convincing of a game at hand

than such an earnest declaration! The last sentence playfully opens the heteronymic

project it is prefacing with its non-conclusive finale: “What is life?”

What is life? What is reality? What is truth? These are the questions Pessoa

raises throughout his poetry, prose, and correspondence. It is with his literary life,

however, that he offers an array of possibilities that stimulate vital, real, and true

contemplation.9 If by asserting that Pessoa, his works and literary self, is made up of and

sustained by irony I have made any reference to his written words suspect, a few poems

remain that might help that reader who grasps for any semblance of a stable platform.

Pessoa’s unedited poems were left unsigned and therefore are not attributed to any

particular person in the dramatic project, including Pessoa “ortônimo.” Perhaps, then,

they bear the voice of the master unmasked, and perhaps not. Regardless, emerging from

the poetic realm of fancy comes a fragmented “philosophy of self,” of himself or his

selves. After all, he is his literature and his literature is him:

Ah, sentir tudo de todos

os feitios!

Não ter substância—só modos

só desvios—

Alma vista de uma estrada

9 Kierkegaard would be pleased. See above the extract from Kierkegaard’s journal praising Socrates’s stimulation of true thought and Kierkegaard’s disregard for learning by rote.

133

Que vira a esmo

Seja eu leitura variada

Para mim mesmo! (OP 677)

[Ah, to feel everything in all

possible ways!

To have no substance—only styles,

only strays—

A soul seen from a road

which turns awry;

May I, for varied readings

Of myself, stand by!]

Innocent as a child at play, Pessoa explains how simple his multiplicity actually is.

Brincava a criança

Com um carro de bois.

Sentiu-se brincando

E disse, eu sou dois!

Há um a brincar

E há outro a saber,

Um vê-me a brincar

E outro vê-me a ver. (OP [550])

134

[A child was playing

With a train and caboose.

He felt himself playing

And said, I am two!

There’s the one at play

And the other just being,

One sees me playing

And one sees me seeing.]

Other poems defensively justify his mode of being many: “Deus não tem unidade, /

Como terei eu?” [God has no unity, / How could I?] (OP [668]). Not immune to the

vicissitudes of emotion, from some of the inedited poems it seems Pessoa might have

been frustrated with his selves at times:

Gostaria, realmente,

De sentir com uma alma só,

Não ser eu só tanta gente

De muitos, meto-me dó.

Não ter lar, vá. Não ter calma

‘Stá bem, nem ter pertencer.

Mas eu, de ter tanta alma,

Nem minha alma chego a ter. (OP [665])

135

[I would really like

To feel with only one soul,

Not to be so many people

So many make me sad.

Not to have a home isn’t bad. Not to have calm

Is fine, Nor to have to belong.

But me, having so many souls,

I somehow manage to not have my own.]

Perhaps he even questioned his own justifications: “Houve em mim várias almas

sucessivas / Ou sou um só inconsciente ser?” [Were there really various successive souls

in me / Or am I one unconscious being?] (OP [763]).

Yet throughout the elements of his poetic and prosaic corpus, Pessoa, while

admitting and justifying his plurality of self, distances his biographical and corporeal self,

sometimes through verisimilitude and certainly by examining the reality of his existence.

Much like his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, Pessoa revels not so much in knowing

himself, which is the first level of ironic being,10 but is more preoccupied with

unknowing himself. He writes, “Que grande sonho / Ser quem não sabe quem é e sorri!”

[What a great dream / To be someone who does not know who he is and still smiles!] (OP

10 Chapter three of this text discusses the explicit references to irony in Soares’s Livro do Desassossego.

136

[655]). In another instance he writes, “Vou em mim como entre bosques, / Vou-me

fazendo paisagem / Para me desconhecer.” [I travel inside of me as if among groves of

trees, / I go making myself the landscape / In order to unknow me.] (OP [646]).

Elsewhere Pessoa proclaims, “Desconheço-me. Embrenha-me, futuro, / Nas veredas

sombrias do que sonho.” [I unknow myself. Hide me, o future, / In the shady footpaths

of what I dream.] (OP [575]). For all of the personalities to whom he gave life, it seems

Pessoa’s aim might have been to lose his own in the crowd. Tauntingly he pens:

Fito-me frente a frente.

Conheço que estou louco.

Não me sinto doente.

Fito-me frente a frente.

[…]

Neste momento claro,

Abdique a alma bem!

Saber não ser é raro.

Quero ser raro e claro. (OP [652])

[I look at myself face to face.

I see that I am crazy.

I don’t feel crazy, though.

137

I look at myself face to face.

[…]

In this lucid moment,

My soul does well to abdicate!

To know how not to be is rare.

I want to be lucid and rare.]

Finally, the culmination of Fernando Pessoa’s “philosophy of self” according to his

unedited poems is a defiant challenge to the reader. He jeers:

Sabes quem sou? Eu não sei.

Outrora, onde o nada foi,

Fui o vassalo e o rei.

É dupla a dor que me dói.

Duas dores eu passei.

Fui tudo que pode haver.

Ninguém me quis esmolar;

E entre o pensar e o ser

Senti a vida passar

Como um rio sem correr. (OP [796])

138

[Do you know who I am? Even I don’t know.

Long ago, when nothing existed,

I was both the vassal and the king.

The pain that pricks me is doubled.

I felt two pains.

I was everything there is to be.

No one wanted to offer me alms;

And between thinking and being

I felt life passing by

Like a river without a current.]

Fernando Pessoa is unassimilable. His mode of being cannot be explained within

any system, for his poetic existence calls into question the definition of reality and

fantasy, of being and especially non-being. As he raises his heteronyms to heights of

actuality, Pessoa makes of his own actuality, his actual self, a possibility.

Gnomos do luar que faz selvas

As florestas sossegadas,

Que sois silêncios nas relvas,

E em áleas abandonadas

Fazeis sombras enganadas,

139

Que sempre se a gente olha

Acabastes de passar

E só um tremor de folha

Que o vento pode explicar

Fala de vós sem falar,

Levai-me no vosso rastro,

Que em minha alma quero ser

Como vosso corpo, um astro

Que só brilha quando houver

Quem o suponha sem ver.

Assim eu que canto ou choro

Quero velar-me a partir.

Lembrando o que não memoro,

Alguns me saibam sentir,

Mas ninguém me definir. (OP [676])

140

[Gnomes in the moonlight that makes jungles

Into tranquil forests,

Who are silent in the tall grass,

And in abandoned footpaths

Make illusory shadows,

Who, if people turn to look,

Have always just passed from sight,

Leaving behind only a rustling leaf

Which the wind might explain,

As it speaks of you without words,

Take me along your path,

For in my soul I long to be

As your bodies are, a star

That brightly burns only when appears

Someone who believes it there without seeing.

Similarly I, who sing or sob,

I want to watch me disappear.

141

Remembering that which I forget,

Some know how to feel me,

But none can define me.]

142

143

144

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